Is it possible to change references when merging into 2 or more assemblies?

[dotfurther]

First off, this is an awesome tool, Kirill.

Use case:

• I have 80+ assemblies I merge into 2 separate assemblies (was using Dotfuscator for this as part of obfuscation process).
• Reason for 2 merged assemblies instead of 1: Any LGPL licensed libraries get merged into 1 assembly to satisfy the LGPL license requirement

However, when I do this, the primary merged assembly's references still 'point' to the individual assemblies now merged into the LGPL merged assembly (so I will get "cannot load assembly..." errors when executing).

Is there a way I can do this currently, and if not, can you point me in the right direction?

Thank you!

[KirillOsenkov]

I can't claim credit for the tool, I just took over the maintenance ;)

I can't be sure but I don't think there's a way to replace references right now. I'd look in ReferencesFixStep.cs - they rewrite every typeref, memberref and assemblyref to point to the rewritten assembly. Almost feels like you want a table with redirects A -> B and take this table into account when rewriting references.

You could try and see if you can solve this at runtime using AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyResolve event. When the runtime wants to load the original assembly that is missing, you pass it the LGPL rewritten assembly instead. Need to see if this will work.

You can also investigate whether you can switch references at MSBuild time. When the Csc compiler task is about to be invoked during CoreCompile, for each project that is going into the primary assembly, remove all LGPL references from the ReferencePath and add the LGPL rewritten assembly instead. This way you can reference the LGPL rewritten assembly when you projects are being compiled. You can use this trick to remove items before a target runs: https://github.com/KirillOsenkov/MSBuildTools/blob/main/ExcludeAnalyzer.proj

Hope this helps!

[dotfurther]

Thank you for the leads, much appreciated