For those of you who haven’t figured out the source of that huge sigh of relief
among the Objective-C community, Facebook released xctool, an
impressive wrapper around xcodebuild that lets you build and run tests for
your iOS or OS X apps from the command line. Yes, you can run xcodebuild
directly to build, but the output is messy and it is very difficult to run iOS
unit tests without resorting to hacking shell scripts like Stewart
Gleadow recommended. Definitely check out xctool if you are trying to do
continous integration or just want a better way to format the output of
xcodebuild.
But that’s not what I’m focusing on here. What impressed me the most was this
bug report filed against xctool about CocoaPods integration.
Victor Ilyukevich gave the expected outcome, steps to reproduce, full logs,
screen casts, sample project…the works. He demonstrated his knowledge of the
problem to address any questions up front and even shared a workaround that he
found. It is certainly a lot of work but it makes it so easy on the maintainers
and cuts through the usual did-you-try-this ping pong game.
Alas, the bug may not be fixable because it depends on knowing how Xcode figures out implicit dependencies. But that doesn’t matter. The bug report is recorded here for all of us to see. This kind of material helps move the open source community forward even if it doesn’t lead to an immediate payoff.
Don’t you wish your users treated you this way?
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