Distribute as XCFramework

[johankool]

Apple has introduced a new way to distributed binary frameworks XCFramework which (in theory) would make workarounds like the strip-frameworks.sh script unnecessary.

Is this something Mapbox could support?

[julianrex]

This is definitely something we would like to support. Keeping this ticket open and transferring.

[julianrex]

cc @nishant-karajgikar @frederoni

[julianrex]

This is blocked by xcframework support in Carthage.

[KaneCheshire]

This also impacts pure SPM projects because you can't currently even download the built binary to include in a local package

[johankool]

Relevant issues in Carthage: Carthage/Carthage#2881 Carthage/Carthage#2801 Carthage/Carthage#3071

[1ec5]

This is blocked by xcframework support in Carthage.

Upon closer inspection, I don’t think this work is blocked by any of the issues listed in #171 (comment):

• When building the map SDK from source for map SDK development purposes, it should be possible to build an XCFramework regardless of Carthage support for XCFramework, because Mapbox.framework is built completely independently of Carthage.
• When integrating the map SDK into an application project using Carthage, a developer can employ the script in Carthage builds fail at xcrun lipo on Xcode 12 beta (3,4,5...) Carthage/Carthage#3019 (comment) to work around carthage’s missing XCFramework support. Various other Mapbox projects have already adopted this workaround, which will also work after merging the Cartfile-based Carthage support in Distinguish between internal and external Carthage usage #548.

This also impacts pure SPM projects because you can't currently even download the built binary to include in a local package

Yes, #546 tracks SPM support and is blocked by XCFramework support.

[chazapis]

This is blocked by xcframework support in Carthage.

Carthage now supports xcframeworks. I have successfully compiled several packages into xcframeworks by running carthage update --no-use-binaries --use-xcframeworks using a compiled version of carthage from the master branch.