Allow for use as a CI tool to check for accidental files / directory issues

[erichoracek]

Allow for use as a CI tool to check for accidental files / directory issues

[marklarr]

It's definitely an interesting thought, but I'm wondering how often people would actually use this workflow. The idea of synx, from Venmo's perspective, was pretty much "dang, we have an old project with a pretty out of sync project folder. It'd be really nice if we could quickly fix this up, and, now that we know better, be mindful of keeping files/folders synced when we create them in the future." The idea wasn't really that it would be run on a project multiple times, although it is certainly possible to use it that way.

Maybe this could be a custom step built into your CI setup?

[erichoracek]

@marklarr Thanks for the response!

I feel like it would just be another great way to protect us against ourselves. Everyone knows that they should run tests before committing, but CI is there to ensure that it always happens regardless of that occasional human error. I could imagine this build flag functioning the same way: even though we know that it's best practice to keep files/folders synced and all files in the repo added to your xcodeproj, synx would be a way to ensure that it always happens regardless of if we remember to check. In my experience, I've found that unused files and mismatched directories accidentally slip into my projects even though I know better; synx would be a great way to prevent that slow buildup of cruft from accumulating once and for all.

[marklarr]

I definitely see where you're coming from. Now that I think about it, it might actually be hard to detect if things are out of place while synx is running. It just builds out a new project folder in a temporary directory, and then replaces your current one with it.

Some options could be running git status to see if anything has changed, or recursively comparing the new project folder to the old one. What do you think?

[erichoracek]

@marklarr That sounds like a decent stopgap solution. CI could run the following:

synx Project.xcodeproj
# Exit 1 if any files have changed, 0 otherwise
git diff-index --quiet HEAD

Thanks again for the quick responses! You can close this if you'd like, or obviously keep open if you want to integrate a similar behavior into synx at any point.

[marklarr]

Cool :) I might close, but if more people seem to want this, I think we can consider adding it into synx!