Enables Tools Metapackages #52609
Description
It should be possible to expose multiple related tools as a single concept and to enable users to install those tools with a single gesture. That's what VS Code enables with the Remote Extension Pack. I started out by installing that pack when VS Code Remote became available. I find that it lower cognitize load. I didn't know which of the scenarios (WSL, SSH, Containers) I most wanted to use so I installed all of them and then let my interest lead me. That worked out. There is effectively no additional cost to all vs one. We should do the same thing for .NET Tools.
We just launched RID specific tools. That's a good feature and pattern. We should use the same approach for meta packages. The approach naturally extends to the scenario.
I have three use cases in mind for this, for tools that we offer
- AI tools (CLI and MCP)
- Diagnostic tools (dotnet-dump and friends)
- Removing most of the tools from the SDK and making them easy to acquire
I get to see quite a few customer Dockerfiles in my role. I've seen so many of them where people install the dotnet diagnostic tools one at a time. In particular, we should find some of those Dockerfiles and figure out how to streamline that scenario. It's a great use case to improve, to enable installing those tools with one gesture.