CocoaPods support

[matthewrfennell]

Do you plan to keep supporting CocoaPods post CocoaPods trunk going read-only (allowing resolution via git)?

We use PromiseKit via CocoaPods at the moment.
We can't switch to SwfitPM since we use AnyPromise quite heavily.
Carthage works ok if we revert the visionOS change but I saw that this may not be officially supported for much longer.

Basically: are there any installation methods apart from SwiftPM that are likely to stick around for a while?

[mxcl]

I’m impressed this library is still getting such active use.

Sure. We can keep supporting it.

You may need to help since you might be the only major CocoaPods consumer and even with agent assistance I'm not sure if we'd get the support right. Eg. we can remove the visionOS stuff since anyone doing visionOS surely will just use Swift async primitives. We can do a major bump if necessary.

[matthewrfennell]

Ok, thank you! The most likely outcome is that we switch to Carthage, if we can drop visionOS from the Carthage builds.

Whatever we choose, I'm happy to help with some level of CocoaPods/Carthage maintenance while we continue to use it, e.g. testing PRs against our project, investigating/fixing problems if they come up. No promises if it gets extremely time-consuming, but it should be manageable.

In the longer term, I'm also up to try to make SwiftPM work with ObjC. I'm not sure I'll do any better than the existing PR, but if there's a way to make it work less intrusively, switching to SwiftPM is good for us anyway.

[mxcl]

Let me see if my agent can figure out the PR.

[mxcl]

I dug into both paths. I don’t think the recommended approach needs a major version bump.

Carthage now: we shouldn’t need to remove visionOS from PromiseKit. Carthage 0.39.1 added visionOS support, and consumers that don’t want it can exclude it explicitly:

carthage update --use-xcframeworks --platform iOS,macOS,tvOS,watchOS

That is documentation-only and can go into an 8.2.x release.

SwiftPM + Objective-C: I would not revive #1193. Its intrusive rewrite was forced by SwiftPM’s current prohibition on mixed Swift/Objective-C targets. SE-0541 is specifically fixing that: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals/0541-flexible-swift-c-interoperability-for-packages.md. The implementation is currently open at swiftlang/swift-package-manager#10292 and its fixtures target Swift tools 6.5.

Once that ships, the small solution should be a Package@swift-6.5.swift manifest that includes the existing Swift and Objective-C sources in the same PromiseKit target. Older Swift versions will keep selecting the existing versioned manifests, so this is additive and should be an 8.3.0 feature, not 9.0.

I would reserve 9.0 for shipping the old target-split/rewrite now, removing platform support globally, or another actual public API/module break.

[mxcl]

Yeah so perhaps we don't fully understand the visonOS issues? LMK

[matthewrfennell]

Thank you, I didn't know about both of these and they both help.

... consumers that don’t want it can exclude it explicitly ...

Ah agreed, I missed that config option as I stopped as soon as I had a proof of concept to show Carthage could work.

SE-0541 is specifically fixing that ...

I've skimmed this and agree it should help. Certainly it makes sense to wait for that before doing anything.

I think this answers my questions then, thanks. We'll decide which of CocoaPods vs Carthage we want to use for now, will try to identify/fix any issues we find if they come up, and then when that SE is available I'll pop back and check if a mixed target works fine.