Creating NuGet hierarchy based on OS

[itaibh]

I'm struggling with this for some time now: I have a nuget that needs to run native code, different binary for each OS (I support Windows, OSX, Linux-X64, Linux-Arm64 and Linux-Alpine).

I currently deploy all the binaries bundled in the same nuget, but since each binary is big (~80-90MB) I want to separate the binaries to sub-nugets, but I don't want the end-users to be affected by this change, so they can still refer to "MyNuget". In order for it to be effective I want it to only restore the relevant sub-nuget according to the OS.

I tried adding conditionals to the ProjectReferences but when I publish the nugets the conditionals are removed and I left with the platform I built on.

I also tried creating .nuspec manually but could't figure out the correct way to set conditonals, and the same goes for .targets file.

I thought this was since I remembered seeing projects which do this but after looking more deeply I figured all those projects asks the user to install the native packages mannually in addition. I know it's possible if building from source, so with a little work on NuGet's side it should be also possible to do even when restoring a package.

To sum up, the structure I'm trying to achieve:

Layer 1: OS-specific cores
[Core.Linux.X64]/[Core.Linux.Arm64]/[Core.Windows.X64]/[Core.OSX]/...

Layer 2: Core selector
   |
   +--> Layer 1

Layer 3: MyNuget
   |
   +--> Layer 2

Layer 4: End-User app

I want to be able to publish the first 3 layers as nugets and let the user (layer 4) only add PackageRefernce to MyNuget (layer 3) and it'll use the core-selector (layer 2) to restore automatically the correct core (layer 1) according to the OS the user is building on.

[itaibh]

Since I saw no update for 2 weeks and since I tried looking to how other packages do it and couldn't find anything I figured it can't be done currently, so I changed this from Q&A to Idea.