Building through Carthage due to missing XCTest incompatibility with Bitcode

[DenTelezhkin]

Hi!

I'm using Carthage dependency manager and Nimble. While trying to install Nimble, here's output i get:

The following build commands failed:
    Ld DerivedData/Nimble/Build/Products/Release-appletvos/Nimble.framework/Nimble normal arm64
(1 failure)
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
A shell task failed with exit code 65:
** BUILD FAILED **


The following build commands failed:
    Ld DerivedData/Nimble/Build/Products/Release-appletvos/Nimble.framework/Nimble normal arm64
(1 failure)

I opened Nimble.xcodeproj, and tried to build Nimble-tvOS framework, it fails with following output:

ld: '/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/AppleTVOS.platform/Developer/Library/Frameworks/XCTest.framework/XCTest' does not contain bitcode. You must rebuild it with bitcode enabled (Xcode setting ENABLE_BITCODE) or obtain an updated library from the vendor for architecture arm64
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)

I'm using XCode 7.1, carthage 0.9.3 and trying to pull Nimble v3.0.0 or master branch.

Any idea what is going on? Thanks in advance.

[yoichitgy]

PR #210 has more info.

I see the same issue, and so far, I use the zipped binaries attached to the latest release.

[jeffh]

Are you testing on the simulator or on device?

[DenTelezhkin]

I want to be able to test on simulator of course.

Basically, framework does not build when running carthage update, but build succeeds if i take Nimble.xcodeproj and drop it into my project.

[Danappelxx]

It's not working for me for TVOS either. Right now I'm just appending --platform macosx,ios to the end of the invocation, but it feels dirty.

[jeffh]

Carthage wants to build for both device and simulator platforms into one binary. I'm not sure if there's anything we can do.

It's probably better to file a radar to apple about this. A second-best solution is to see if the carthage team would want to address this.

[nickygerritsen]

So what's the best way to this right now? Not use Carthage for Quick and Nimble? Any suggestions here?

[mdiep]

Here's a summary of the current status:

• tvOS requires bitcode
• XCTest doesn't include bitcode for tvOS
• Consequently, Nimble can't link for tvOS on the actual device
• Carthage always builds fat binaries that include both simulator and device slices
• Consequently, carthage build fails for Nimble for tvOS

You can work around this by:

• Using submodules and including Nimble.xcodeproj in your project's workspace
• Using Carthage's --platform flag if you're not building for tvOS

I think Nimble should also be able to attach pre-built frameworks to its GitHub releases for Carthage to use. If the tvOS framework included there doesn't have a device slice, then I think things will work.

I don't think there's an easy way for Carthage to work around this. If anyone has a good idea for how to detect it generally—not special casing for Nimble.framework, but detecting that XCTest is a dependency or that a dependency doesn't have bitcode—then I'd be open to adding something to Carthage.

Ideally, Apple would include bitcode in XCTest so that this wouldn't be a problem.

[DenTelezhkin]

I think Nimble should also be able to attach pre-built frameworks to its GitHub releases for Carthage to use. If the tvOS framework included there doesn't have a device slice, then I think things will work.

I don't think it's a good idea to make prebuilt frameworks until Swift 3.0 is released and is ABI-stable, Apple recommends against it.

I was able to use Nimble from Carthage by using submodules, and including Nimble xcodeproj in my xcodeproj, thus building from source.

So,

carthage update --use-submodules --no-use-binaries

command will fail, however it will successfully fetch all required dependencies. After initial install, I use

carthage checkout

Or update submodules to fetch latest source. It seems like an Apple stuff that needs to be fixed by including bitcode for tvOS.

[mdiep]

You can use --no-build instead of --no-use-binaries. Then the command will succeed and you can build Nimble by including the Xcode project.

[phatblat]

Carthage 0.17 is out now and has a change to work around this issue.