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Comment by h0l0cube | Hacker News Reader

What’s more scandalous are the 10+ gig Xcode updates. What justifies this absurd payload size for every minor version upgrade?

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This is fixed in Xcode 15.

The "absurd payload size" is the effect of having at least four different SDKs (macOS, watchOS, i[Pad]OS, tvOS) bundled, including a simulator for three of them.

Xcode 15 is a ~3.5 gigs download, and includes only macOS SDKs, with all of the other (including the visionOS SDK + sim) ones being downloaded on-demand.

I swear delta updates were a thing at one point. When did that stop being the case?

They’re still A Thing for App Store apps I think, but:

- using App Store for Xcode was historically very painful and ~nobody who uses Xcode daily downloads it from MAS

- it never worked ~that well~ for Xcode anyway - apart from the big download sizes, the problem with Xcode and the bundled SDKs is that they’re all approximately trillion little text files, and it’s not unheard of to wait longer for codesign (technically unxip) verification than for the download itself, which negates the user-facing benefits of delta upgrades for many users.

Xcode is so painful. I had to install it on mojave for some command line program dependency that demanded xcode be installed. Ok, lets try installing xcode via the command line. Turns out that did not install whatever was in the xcode suite that this tool depended on so I needed the web download. Problem was, I am on mojave. It took way to long to dig up the appropriate download link that was compatible. Then of course like all large web downloads from apple, I had to babysit it and restart the download when it failed every couple hundred mb.

Then extract the xip (requires double the space) then wait forever for it to verify. One of the small things I do not miss after quitting being an iPhone dev.

I always use MAS to install my production Xcode, specifically because it lets me have small updates.

I've been doing this for as long as it's been available there as a developer at Apple, in my own startup, and in my current role as well. Never had a problem with it.

I'm pretty sure mas-cli [https://github.com/mas-cli/mas] is abandonware. It hasn't received any meaningful updates in almost 2 years and most of its features are broken

I've tried MAS many times and never had it work. It always gets stuck downloading at 80% or something.

Never seen it get stuck, but I have seen it take 12 hours to get through that last 20%.

That might have been what happened for me, except I give up and sudo rm -rf it, leaving MAS in a confused state while I go download the dmg/xip directly.

Worth noting Xcode 15 is still in beta which is why I (and other mobile developers I work with) didn't know this was a thing. Glad they eventually got to this, but judging by the upvotes (and my own personal experience) this would have been welcome much sooner.

On one of my computers Xcode always seems to download... twice. I can't for the life of me figure out whether its doing some sort of "serial update" where if I miss a version in-between, it first downloads and installs that version, then immediately starts the latest one, or if its just a weird bug where it installs the latest version twice, consecutively, for no apparent reason. I've seen other people report this as well. I find it hard to believe its the "serial" explanation, as one of the few benefits of just downloading the entire program every single time is that it shouldn't need the intermediate diffs. So yeah, I have no idea what's going on. My other computer seems to not have this happen... yet?

A few years ago I had a Mac that did that. Pretty sure it was because I actually had two Xcodes, one from the App Store and one downloaded from developer.apple.com.

There's something charmingly frustrating about typing "git" into the command line, and then waiting 4-5 hours for "Xcode Command-line Tools" to install.

Maybe they shipped the installer pictures as uncompressed originals like they did a long time ago with some update I forgot the name of. But what resulted in a few MB update to be hundreds of MBs.

Do the updates still take forever on new hardware? I have a M1 MacMini and it feels like every update takes like three hours.

App Store (softwareupdated) takes forever to update Xcode for some reason. I suspect some accidental nonlinear behavior. Downloading Xcode.xip from https://developer.apple.com/downloads and directly unpacking and replacing is way faster. Then I run a script to remove all the useless platforms.

This is the way I've always done it. Grab the package for manual install. Using the App Store version was always a massive pain.

Because "download too big" is a better problem than "what the fuck do I need to install to do XXX." XCode has the first problem, Visual Studio has both.

That is crazy. Im also bitter that you basically need xcode for git on macOS

If it's just git and the compiler environment ("SDK") you need then the command line developer tools suffice. The download is something like 700 MiB.

Not if you use the Nix package manager: https://nixos.org/

Before that though I used to only install command line tools.

At some point though, I forgot the incantation for it and realized I could just use Nix for git as I was using it for other things already.

You need the developer tools (like 2.5gb), or homebrew.

A lot of homebrew installs (those from code) require Apple's compile time stuff which only xcode has.

No, you can build pretty much everything from homebrew using just the command line developer tools. It's been like that for 7-8 years, if not more. Off the top of my head I've only once ever run into a homebrew recipe requiring "xcodebuild" to proceed.

You can only install the command line tools now. You don't need a full blown Xcode install.

no you don't. You just need the devtools which are like 2 gigs. I have developed on mac for years and have never had xcode installed.

Or download the official git binary (https://sourceforge.net/projects/git-osx-installer/) if you don't even want devtools. Been a while since I did that, but there are plenty of other things I avoid building or downloading from a package manager (like NodeJS or Python).

> the official git binary

Unfortunately, as the git website [1] states, these are fairly out of date (currently 2.33 from 2021-08-30). To get something recent, you have to build them yourself, which requires...devtools.

Seems bizarre, to me, that they don't have them built automatically.

[1] https://git-scm.com/download/mac

Yeah, it's weird how out of date it is, but it also doesn't matter a lot. I think my laptop still has a version of git from 2018.

Some tools, with git integration, require the newer versions. For example, newer PyCharm requires newer git.

That makes sense.

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