Cocoapods: An Objective-C library package manager | Hacker News Reader

Cocoapods: An Objective-C library package manager

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67 pointsjamesjyu21 comments

Out of curiosity, why the dependency on MacRuby? The only thing I've seen in the digging I've done thus far is the CFUUID stuff, but that is easy enough to recreate in Ruby so I think I must be missing something...

I suspect that you'll see many more benefits of using MacRuby for the project going forward. For example, think about the sorts of things that Bundler (being written in Ruby) can do for Ruby gems that rvm (being mostly written in shell script) cannot.

Good question, it’s because of reading and writing the project.pbxproj file through NSDictionary: https://github.com/alloy/cocoapods/blob/master/lib/cocoapods....

Without better documentation I can't really evaluate this. Who runs the central repository? How is it kept up to date?

I feel my skepticism is warranted for a week-old project.

* Yes, good documentation is needed. Patches are very welcome :)

* The community. The idea is that once you have one patch accepted you get push access. This applies to both https://github.com/alloy/cocoapods and https://github.com/alloy/cocoapods-specs.

* “How is it kept up to date?” Can you explain what “it” is?

"It" being the package repository.

If you mean on the end-user's machine: $ pod repo update

I wonder why the author didn't go for the obvious pun, Cocoabeans?

Oh, wait, I think I know why. :)

Starts with “J” and ends with “ava” ;)

WOW. you created my idea I posted a few days ago here! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2997247

ZOMG, indeed! You’re welcome! :D

On a more serious note, I had been trying not to create this for about a year now. The release of the boilerplate project made me decide it’s time to finally scratch that itch.

Also, please please please start contributing specifications: https://github.com/alloy/cocoapods-specs :)

I am crazy excited about this. With the growing number of Objective-C libraries, this will make things so much better.

Anyone tried Zimt? https://github.com/zimt/zimt - looks similar to cocoapods, looks more mature.

Is there a specific feature that makes you say that? Or is it the age?

This is very interesting. I will be watching this project.

So glad someone has finally done this...

There are already package managers that have been developed for years (ie: hard problems solved and bugs ironed out), can track dependencies across languages/runtimes, and have large cross-language communities.

Cocoapods isn't even cross-platform. It's only for iOS libraries, which means it only works on macs, which means it won't offer much beyond mac package managers. So use macports, or fink, or homebrew, or nyx.

That seems to be the whole point is to provide a specialized manger For libraries on a Mac. Some people don't want a general solution to a specific problem.

iOS libraries need to be cross-compiled and statically linked. (Dynamic linking is not allowed in apps submitted to the store, IIRC.) I'm sure macports or whatever CAN be forced to do both of these, but it's easiest just to make something new, lean and efficient.

You're missing the point. This is not a tool for end-users, but rather for developers. iOS/OS X already have a means of distributing third-party libraries with projects (the "./Frameworks" directory), there just has not, until now, been a good way for developers to find and organize these libraries during development. The goal of this project is to give developers that way of sharing, discovering, and resolving dependencies of libraries, but at the end of the day everything will still get packaged up as a "*.app" that is distributed via the App Store.

Also, the reason to create a custom tool for this instead of repurposing one of the many existing package managers is that it allows for the tool to be specialized for the specific case of developing App Store apps. Sure, you can install a third-party library via macports, but how do you tell macports to compile the library and place the resulting frameworks into the right directory in your Xcode project?

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