|
| ▲ | Manfred 7 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| You have to understand where we came from. Development for iOS and macOS (then MacOS) meant you had to pluck source files from random places on the internet and weave them into your Xcode build. Xcode and xcodebuild didn't really shine in the department of extensibility. Eloy designed CocoaPods to be the absolute minimum we needed to deal with dependencies for the projects we were working on. So that meant: * Rely on GitHub for hosting so nobody would get bankrupted running the repo, with the option to switch over to self-hosted in case that ever became necessary.
* Use Git and existing project tools on GitHub to deal with external contributions for pods.
* Use Ruby for scripting because that was what people used most at that time.
* Use Ruby for pod definitions for flexibility and reduced development time (ie. so CocoaPods didn't need a parser). For a long time this was a one-person effort. All of those decision obviously have downsides, even more obvious now you have to power of hindsight given years of incremental improvements on speed and security of dependency managers. I think Eloy did a great job in general and the popularity gained speaks for itself. |
| |
| ▲ | mrbombastic 7 days ago | parent [-] | | I am going to start sounding like a dinosaur but I really hate this dev tendency to trash the old way as soon as the new way comes out. I am seeing it with all the devs advocating for mise over asdf, and a year ago they were all singing asdf’s praises. I think we can advocate for better while still thanking those we are building upon. Long winded way of saying: thanks to the cocoapods maintainers, you made iOS dev better for a lot of people. | | |
| ▲ | eviks 7 days ago | parent [-] | | > and a year ago they were all singing asdf’s praises. This can't be true, many people recognized all the deficiencies contemporaneously and even complained about them publicly? | | |
| ▲ | mrbombastic 7 days ago | parent [-] | | Not sure what you mean exactly, but what I assume happens is someone finds the new thing and the old things deficiencies become more apparent because they are both called out by creators of the new thing and probably a major reason the new thing exists. The devs that found new thing start advocating for it while bashing the old thing. Like I said I think it is fine and healthy to advocate for and want to improve tooling, it just bugs me when it is done while bashing what was likely a fairly thankless labor of love. |
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | K0nserv 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes! I'm a little biased as someone who worked briefly on CocoaPods, but it was an indispensable tool for many years. This is evident by its massive popularity. Like with NPM, many people ran into issues ultimately rooted in not understanding the tool. CocoaPods had the extra constraint that correctly setting up a Ruby environment was hard. If you used Ruby with a fixed ruby version, bundler with a Gemfile.lock and then CocoaPods it worked well. |
|
| ▲ | weego 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No pods are an absolute misery and at best a concrete example of what not to do. So at least there's that. |
|
| ▲ | tomashubelbauer 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As a very occasional iOS developer, I never enjoyed it. I preferred Carthage and jumped over SPM the moment it became available. I understand SPM didn't or even still doesn't meet the needs of many professional iOS developers, but for my hobby needs, it was the simplest and easiest to use. |
| |
| ▲ | jurip 7 days ago | parent [-] | | I preferred Carthage in theory, but every time I tried using it in anger I hit enormous stumbling blocks with projects not actually living up to its exacting standards, then spent hours faffing about before going back to CocoaPods. I'm happy to see the back of CocoaPods, but it kickstarted the library package ecosystem on the Apple platforms, where there was nothing like it before. |
|
|
| ▲ | swiftcoder 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It may not have been great, but it was certainly better than the likely alternative (no package management at all for iOS development). |
|
| ▲ | Cthulhu_ 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Probably not, but all modern-day package managers owe a debt to Cocoapods for the things it did right and the things that could have been better. |
|
| ▲ | gregoriol 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Better than the "current" future |
|
| ▲ | frizlab 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No. |
|
| ▲ | rvz 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Absolutely No. |
|
| ▲ | Copenjin 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| No. |
