Checking in CocoaPods files

I’ve gone back and forth on the debate with whether or not we should be checking in the dependencies for a project supplied by CocoaPods.  In the past I felt it was best to only check in the Podfile and maybe the lock file.  I believe I’ve finally made a decision with recent experiences and my development practices with Git.

I’m checking in the whole effing workspace.

Why?

• Every branch, especially master, should be compilable and archivable up to a point.
  • Caveat 1: Xcode is a piece of shit sometimes and will break things because it can between versions.
  • Caveat 2: Provisioning Profiles.
• CocoaPods is a well-maintained tool, however, Specs are a crap-shoot.
  • Specs can disappear.
  • Specs can be unofficially maintained.
  • Specs can be wrong.
• Checking in your Pods directory ensures the best possible snapshot of the pre-binary code.
  • Forcing a pod install every time someone checks out code doesn’t ensure the same state of code is maintained for testing bugs in previous versions.
  • You may decide to drop Pods support and forget how to use it.
  • Wouldn’t it be nice to do diffs on your dependency classes?
• Xcode Bots doesn’t work well enough yet with CocoaPods for me to want to install Pods every build
  • I’m also not sold on Xcode Bots itself – it’s quite unreliable and likes to smoke my server’s CPU.
  • CocoaPods needs to not be a hinderance – its pretty innocuous when the risky work (installing Pods) is done and checked in.

That sums up my thoughts.  I primarily work on WordPress for iOS which is a heavily forked and contributed to repository.  I don’t think the project could be a success with the amount of branching and pull requests performed if we didn’t check in the Pods directory.