#430 #378 #377 Could be resolved if repository owner provides a cli binary in release Tags

@dabrahams any thoughts about that?

I don't, but I bet @lucteo has useful input.

Hi

I'm not an expert on swift build system, so I'm not sure if I can provide the best help here. But, regardless if this helps, I'm happy to share my experience.

The first problem we wanted to solve was how to build swift-format, especially since we needed a feature on main that was not yet released. We didn't want to directly use main, as we were afraid of changes in swift-format that would break our workflow. But even without that problem, building swift-format was not always successful (especially on CI). To solve this, we forked swift-format and committed `Package.resolved. See https://github.com/val-lang/swift-format. We always have a controlled version of swift-format, and that always builds.

We depend on swift-format in our Package.swift. Yes, builds are slower (especially for clean builds), but that's ok for us. Please note that for the CI job, we use a debug build of swift-format, as the compilation in release is much slower..

The second major hurdle we had to jump is executing swift-format for our code. We tried using the two build plugins provided in swift-format repo, but they were too slow to run. With a debug build, running them on all the targets could take almost a minute on my machine. Not a great experience :)

We wrote a shell script that would execute swift-format by directories, not by target. In this, we had a shortcut to search for the swift-format executable in known locations. If that fails, we just run swift-format through swift run -c <build_mode> swift-format <args>. This works well in all our needed cases, including CI. See script at: https://github.com/val-lang/val/blob/main/Tools/run-swift-format.sh.

We never tested this for windows builds (we had many problems with our CI Windows build, until we disabled it -- way too unstable). The CI job runs on Ubuntu, and some of us run the tool on Mac.

Hope that helps

Best regards,
LucTeo

Possible pipeline:
https://github.com/mtgto/docker-swift-format/tree/main

Any updates on it?

Tracked in Apple’s issue tracker as rdar://126948314

Any updates on it? Would be super nice to get it in a short time. I think swift-format could grow in audience if this distribution were added.