Updated Autofac Assembly Versioning Strategy - New Package Releases
Until now, Autofac assemblies have changed version using a slow-changing assembly version but a standard semantic version for the NuGet package and file version.
The benefit of that approach is we could avoid some painful assembly redirect issues.
The drawback, of course, is that even minor changes (adding new functionality in a backwards-compatible way) can cause problems – one project uses version 3.0.0.0 of Autofac and works great, a different project also uses version 3.0.0.0 of Autofac but breaks because it needs some of that newer functionality. That’s hard to troubleshoot and pretty much impossible to fix. (It’s the wrong version of 3.0.0.0? That’s a new kind of dependency hell.)
As a compromise to that, we’ve switched to work sort of like MVC and Web API – for major and minor (X.Y) changes, the assembly version will change, but not for patch-level changes; for all changes, the NuGet package and file versions will change.
This initial switch will potentially be a little painful for folks since it means every Autofac package has to be re-issued to ensure assembly dependencies line up. After that, we should be running smooth again.
You’ll see a 0.0.1 update to the packages – all of those have the new assemblies with the new versions and proper prerequisite references. (Not entirely sure 0.0.1 was the right semantic version increment, but, well, c’est la vie.)
Really sorry about the bit of upgrade pain here. I had hoped we could sneak the change out on a package-by-package basis, but as each integration or extras package gets released, it gets its dependencies set and has assembly references, so we’d end up releasing everything a few times – the first time for when the version of the integration package changes; a second time for when core Autofac changes; and one more time for every time any other dependencies change. For packages like Autofac.Extras.Multitenant.Wcf (which relies on Autofac, Autofac.Integration.Wcf, and Autofac.Extras.Multitenant), it’d mean releasing it a minimum of four times just for the assembly reference changes. Best just to rip the bandage off, right? (I hope?)
NuGet should take care of the assembly redirect issues for you, but if you see assembly dependency conflict warnings in your build, it’s because you’ve not updated all of your Autofac packages.