alt Hacker NewsThis is really sad, because the replacement, Swift Package Manager, is really crap: it lacks some useful features (an "outdated" command, meaningful commandline output, ...), is buggy as hell in xcode (most of the time xcode just crashes when you add/removed a dependency, error messages while getting a repository are not understandable and even often not visible entirely, many repositories have some old Package.swift that current developer tools won't read, ...), and worst of all, it stores the full repositories of all the dependencies with their full history on your machine and downloads them every time when you do CI properly, which often means GBs of data.
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SwiftPM been little trouble for me, with the most complex project involving a number of external packages and a couple of local ones. No crashes or anything like that.
It’s been way, way less trouble than CocoaPods was before I switched several years ago. CocoaPods was so bad about screwing itself up that I’d just check in its dependencies in a building state and avoid upgrading anything unless I absolutely had to, because inevitably when doing updates or even just resolving my project would somehow hit some number of the many edge cases that’d cause it to blow up.
In contrast with SwiftPM I keep most dependencies pretty close to current because it’s painless to do so.
In fact it’s been good enough to me that I wish it were possible to replace the awful mess that is Gradle with SwiftPM (or a 1:1 JVM counterpart) on the Android side. I need approximately none of Gradle’s flexibility and bells and whistles that make it such a pain in the rear, so something with SwiftPM’s simplicity would be a serious QoL improvement.
Yeah, I’ve hit many pain points over the years with SwiftPM. Its restrictions on compiler flags is also problematic.
If you're looking for an outdated command, maybe this works for you? https://github.com/kiliankoe/swift-outdated/
Disclaimer: I wrote this (a while back)
My biggest criticism with SPM is that there doesn't seem to be a way to use it with git worktree since the package cache is centralized as opposed to being at the directory/project/workspace level.
Yeah, no, cocoapods was a nightmare compared to SPM, every ios update supplied a new unsolved issue in one pod or another that required dark incantations.
Managing a local pods caused issues so great engineers quit
I don’t know, I’ve never had those problems and my codebases reach 600k+ LOC. I’ve certainly had plenty of errors to deal with Cocoapods and obsolete frameworks though, though those projects also tend to use pretty much every third-party lib that gets attention on Medium.
Modularizing an Xcode project with local Swift packages has been the best productivity gain in my experience. Doing something similar with Cocoapods is a headache.