AndroidLibrary Manifest attribute cannot resolve tilde (~)

[dipidoo]

Android framework version

net9.0-android

Affected platform version

.NET 9.0.101

Description

https://github.com/dotnet/android/blob/d5152b6aea72e50d4089468339d14b80db1919dd/src/Xamarin.Android.Build.Tasks/Tasks/JavaDependencyVerification.cs#L268-L271

The Include attribute can resolve tilde just fine.

Steps to Reproduce

        <AndroidLibrary Include="~/some.aar"
            Manifest="~/some.pom"
            JavaArtifact="some:some:1.1.0"
            Bind="False" />

Did you find any workaround?

not using tilde i.e. /Users/***

Relevant log output

/usr/local/share/dotnet/packs/Microsoft.Android.Sdk.Darwin/35.0.39/tools/Xamarin.Android.Bindings.JavaDependencyVerification.targets(27,5): error XA4245: Specified POM file '~/some.pom' does not exist

[dellis1972]

You cannot use those kinda of paths in MSbuild. they are not expanded.
You can use $(HOME) instead if you need to.

Also picking up something from the home directory is not really going to work on other machines (like CI etc).

[jonathanpeppers]

Expanding ~ inside an item group would be an MSBuild feature, take for example:

<ItemGroup>
  <Compile Include="~/foo.cs" />
</ItemGroup>

I don't think they would want to implement a unix-specific feature like this, but we can move this to dotnet/msbuild for them to comment.

[BenjaminBrienen]

~ is a valid folder name on Windows, so the behavior would be weird. Imagine if you have a folder called ~ neighboring the project file. We also should consider whether compiling content from outside of the project root is a best practice.