[aerogear-dev] xctool and xcpretty

[Christos Vasilakis]

Hi everyone,

During the last couple of days, as part of my AGIOS-181[1] work, got bumped by problem issues of xctool[2] during builds both local and on travis. Let me try to explain the two major issues faced:

a) first the current release fails to run logic tests for an Xcode 5.1 project, fixed in ‘master' some hours ago[3]
b) starting up the emulator to run ‘application' tests always failed on travis [4]. Not sure why, switching to the build-in xcodebuild fixed the issue, so I guess its some issue with xctool. (used to work prior).

In a nutshell, xctool tries to mimic the behaviour of xcodebuild during builds and understandable it can’t catch up with its future developments. Major benefit of xctool is the nice formatting output during tests which helps a lot to identify issues. The ideal would be a tool that relies on xcodebuild (so it’s always up-to-date with apple development at the minute of the release) and give a nice formatting output of the results. Fortunately enough the flourish iOS OSS community stepped in and ‘xcpretty’ was created[5].  It provides the same benefits of xctool (if better)  but relies on xcodebuild for its build for maximum compatibility. Already major projects have adopted for their builds[6]. 

I think it’s sensible if we follow this path and adopt xcpretty for our builds.

Wdyt?

Regards,
Christos



[1] https://issues.jboss.org/browse/AGIOS-181
[2] https://github.com/facebook/xctool
[3] https://github.com/facebook/xctool/issues/337
[4] https://travis-ci.org/cvasilak/aerogear-ios-integration/builds/21524580
[5] https://github.com/supermarin/xcpretty
[6] https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking/blob/master/Rakefile#L34