Packages, versioning and archiving

According to the documentation, when the project is checked out from a repository loaded and the specific package is missing on the local machine, it will be automatically installed by Unity - I didn't observe such behavior (at least for some packages, they needed to be installed manually in order to their assets to show up). Is it a bug or expected behavior?

Anyway, this makes new checkouts very annoying as besides getting supposedly all project code and data, we end up with not working project unless we do some investigation and perform additional manual tasks.

Also, this means that the repository doesn't contain everything to archive the project for the future reference. Is there a way to archive everything including used packages in order retrieve the project in a distant future (provided we have an appropriate Unity version archived as well)?

Maybe there should be a way to force packages to be a part of the versioned project?

 

did you commit

Packages/manifest.json

?

 

Yes.

 

then it should import the packages listed as dependencies when you open the project with Unity.
if it doesn't, you can send a bug report (https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/bug-reporting)

also, "packages" refer to the new package manager packages.
if you imported some ".unitypackage" file from the asset store into your Assets/ folder, you should still commit the contents in your repo