What is the difference between homebrew casks 'dotnet' and 'dotnet-sdk' and formula 'dotnet'

Question

Running brew search dotnet shows the following

❯ brew search dotnet
==> Formulae
dotnet                                                                  dotbot

==> Casks
dotnet-preview                      dotnet-sdk-preview                  dotnet                              dotnet-sdk ✔

I am interested to know what are the differences between

• the cask dotnet
• the cask dotnet-sdk
• the formula dotnet

I am guessing the casks are the SDK and the runtime of dotnet (i.e. similar to what the JDK and the JRE are, you need dotnet to run a .NET app and dotnet-sdk to compile and develop one. But what is the forumla (non-cask) version of dotnet do ?

Answer 1

I think that is a good question. In general, the main difference between cask and core is cask is installing from the artifacts built by vendors, while core is built from the source code. (And core formulae has a license field thing to enforce the OSS nature of the software).

On top of that, dotnet helps to build other homebrew formulae. Right now, there are three formulae depend on dotnet:

• archi-steam-farm
• dafny
• gitversion