[Question] Allow iOS version update without OSX only tools ?

[stovmascript]

[Question] Allow iOS version update without OSX only tools ?

[stovmascript]

Yeah, sounds reasonable. Perhaps some -L, --legacy switch à la nodemon.

[ujwal-setlur]

Hey @stovmascript, thanks! In the meantime, I wrote a tiny CLI utility jsplist to manipulate plist files. Not sure if this will be useful for you here, but you are welcome to look at it.

https://github.com/ujwal-setlur/jsplist/blob/master/README.md

[stovmascript]

@raphaelvigee @ujwal-setlur @allyburns Alright guys, new version (2.4.0) is out now on npm, free of the macOS/Xcode dependency by default.

If you're on a Mac and need or want to use the native agvtool method, add the -L, --legacy option to your command.

[stovmascript]

So I started working on it. Xcode parsing is done. Now working on updating plists, which is the easy part. Unfortunately, all of the plist parsing utils out there right now can't pretty print the file back out with a custom or original indentation, which makes for bad diffs.

[stovmascript]

I considered using node-xcode or a plist parser at the start of the project, but in the end opted for agvtool so I could plow through and because it takes care of everything (multiple project files and plists) with one command.

Seeing as it's needed now, it would be appropriate to take a look at it again and free us from the macOS dependency.

Only problem is that I'll be free to work on this in mid-June. So in the meantime, I'll accept a PR, if you want to take a stab at it @raphaelvigee. That would be great.

[stovmascript]

We could actually pull out agvtool altogether and get rid of #15.

[raphaelvigee]

I have a busy schedule at the moment, I'll try to give it a try.

Do you consider dropping completly the xcode dependency or adding a fallback ?

[stovmascript]

I think that if we recreate the behaviour we have right now with agvtool, we will cover more platforms including macOS, so I don't think a fallback would be needed. There's also some checks for the Xcode CLI tools, which could then be removed.

The only downside is that as Xcode and React Native evolve, we might have to adjust things more than just updating the docs to account for some new thing that RN or Xcode require.

[raphaelvigee]

Yes of course, some maintenance work would be necessary, that's why I was thinking about keeping the xcode behavior and giving the user a choice

[ujwal-setlur]

any update on this? Thanks.

[stovmascript]

Hey @ujwal-setlur, I've been swamped recently, but might be able to squeeze some time in this weekend and finally start working on it.

[ujwal-setlur]

I would imagine most of it would be whitespaces, right? Most diff utils can handle that with the appropriate flag, I would think. Or some combination of diff and tr.

[stovmascript]

The plists RN comes with are indented with tabs, same indentation done by plutil of the Xcode toolchain. On top of that it doesn't indent the first <dict> tag. I know it's a detail, but when doing manual upgrades of RN, it's a pain to notice changes in a simple git diff when the indentation keeps changing.

[allyburns]

@stovmascript - Thank you for working on a version that doesn't rely on OSX only tools. I just discovered this package today and want to add it to our workflow, which will be possible once you finish cracking this Issue, thanks for finding the time.

[stovmascript]

@allyburns I'm actually just finalizing the work right now. Should be released momentarily.