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Well, maybe I can fill in, though we maybe need to agree on a safe word where you reel me in.

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I've debated whether I should bring it up because the news topic is, I mean, effectively, I'm talking about one of my packages,

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which I've been using for quite a number of projects now.

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And that's why I feel like it's really useful and maybe worth talking about and mentioning it so people can check it out if they need it for their work.

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And the background of that is the documentation pages are becoming more popular and more relied upon.

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So we do have a need of having a more fine grained availability testing in place.

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Now, we do have probes in place to alert us if the homepage is unavailable.

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Surge, I think we have a couple of we have like a little smoke test script, which is actually also powered by that same tool.

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And we also have Azure's availability probes in place and something else called status cake.

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Status cake, yeah.

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What's the history of that name of that web page status cake? That doesn't seem like a...

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I have no idea.

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I've been using them for years, but I have no idea where their name came from. But it is odd. It is odd.

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Every time I get an email, you know, typically when I do maintenance on staging where we don't have redundancy,

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you know, we get the status cake email and staging is done.

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I think, what on earth were they thinking naming that status cake? But yeah, it does its job.

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While we're talking about the smoke test, there was as well, you may remember,

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there was a time when our smoke test tested every single package page. Do you remember that?

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Yes. Yeah, that was... I made it so easy to actually test all the pages that I didn't stop to think whether I should.

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So the main purpose of this is we need more fine grained availability testing.

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So we need to test more pages because there are a number of doc pages that we can already see by the traffic that they are visited a lot.

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So we should ensure that they're there.

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And there's typically no risk that they should disappear once they're there, except for a couple of edge cases.

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And that is if a new version were to be published, and that version had build errors for some reason,

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you know, might either be the package having issues, which is unlikely for those packages.

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But it also might be a problem with our build system or something else going wrong.

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Or the latest Swift version may be having a problem and not preventing the docs from being published.

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So in that case, the latest version might not be available, but the main branch would still be there to pick up the issue.

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However, if there's an actual problem with a package, it's quite likely that also the main pages might have a problem.

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So in any case, we do actually want to know for a detailed list of packages, the popular ones, that the documentations are up.

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And as far as I know, there aren't a whole lot of things that allow you to create these sort of testers easily.

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On macOS, I've used Paw to do API exploration and a little bit of testing as well,

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which is a great tool for those who don't know, where you can put in a URL and add query parameters and all that,

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do post requests and all that sort of stuff and then run that repeatedly.

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But that's obviously not something that's easy to deploy into a CI environment,

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because what we want to do is have a script that a crawler uses to hit pages and then also verify the return codes.

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And the tool we're using is actually a package of mine that I wrote four years ago now for exactly that purpose,

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to do testing of pages and like detailed testing, not just for the return code, but also return results.

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So if it's a JSON API, you can drill into the payload that you're getting back and you can even use that payload to drive further requests.

40
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So the initial purpose was to both do the testing where you do sign up testing, for instance,

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you create a user account and then you get the token back, you sign in.

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That's obviously quite complicated to do with curl, because you'd have to get the result back,

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then use something to pass the JSON, get the data out, stick it in the next request.

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And you can imagine doing that in a shell script.

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Of course, yeah.

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Can be super fiddly.

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So what I at the time used initially was a JavaScript tool called strest.

48
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And that worked okay, but then it was missing a few things.

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And rather than try and extend something, you know, in a language that I'm not very familiar with,

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what do you do? You rewrite it.

51
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And that's what I did at the time.

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And this is the tool Resta, which we're using now to do our general smoke testing.

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So we're just a couple of pages, but also in this case, this fine grained documentation page testing.

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And the nice thing is, this is driven by a YAML file that effectively is the script.

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And that YAML file is very easy to just auto generate from a list of URLs that we just query from the database.

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So we have a little extension on our server package that actually writes out a list of URLs that we want to probe.

57
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And that YAML file, we just ship with a repository.

58
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And there's a scheduled job that runs the Resta tool, which then queries all the URLs and checks that return codes are as expected.

59
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And the whole thing will fail with an error if any of the URLs aren't available or something like that.

60
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And we've been using that for quite a while now.

61
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So right from the beginning of our smoke test, we've been using that Resta package to not only detect these latest documentation pages, but also every page that we test.

62
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Yeah, it's not new.

63
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So we actually have a stage that runs after a deployment that probes the whole page, a search page and another page just to make sure the deployment is up and nothing's broken.

64
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No, it's a great little tool.

65
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I'm glad we have it.

66
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Right.

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I think that's it with the news, isn't it?

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Yeah, I think it's a fairly slim week on news.

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I guess that's the way it happens sometimes, isn't it?

70
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That's the way it is.

71
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Yeah.

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I feel like I'm in a meeting in my bus where I have to describe what I've done over the last three weeks.

73
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Yeah, it's an awkward stand up where you think, oh, god damn it, what did I do?

74
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I was so busy, but nothing's actually finished.

75
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I know I've done stuff.

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There's one other thing I worked on that I'll probably talk about some other time because it's not quite done.

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I want to tie it all together.

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We also might have a bit more news in other areas to talk about next time.

79
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But in the meantime, maybe we can do something that we haven't done for a while.

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And I hope you forgot that we talked about that last time.

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And that is a...

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Is it a quiz time?

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Okay.

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It is quiz time.

85
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Yes.

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Remember what the open question was that we left dangling last time?

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I remember that there was an open question.

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I don't know what the question was.

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So that's a good thing, I think.

90
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That's great.

91
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That's a great excuse.

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So I can be fairly sure that you didn't look up the details.

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My terrible memory is a feature, not a bug.

94
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Yes.

95
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So the question was, are there any other Linux-only packages that we had?

96
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The topic last time we talked about documentation generation on Linux.

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And that was triggered by two packages, auto-1 package benchmark and package Frostflake.

98
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So these were the two example packages.

99
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And the question was, are there actually a lot of Linux-only packages?

100
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And I had a look.

101
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So what's your guess?

102
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How many overall packages are only testing as available on Linux?

103
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Obviously, when we test something to be only available on Linux,

104
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doesn't necessarily mean it is.

105
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So that's just the result of our tests.

106
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Of course.

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Yeah.

108
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Yeah.

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I think it's fairly low.

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I would say we're what?

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5,500-ish total.

112
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I would say 10.

113
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Oh, wow.

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It's nine.

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That was a...

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You get three points for that one.

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And I'll thank my SQL queries.

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No, I'm kidding.

119
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I didn't do it.

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Actually, I sat down.

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I thought, oh, God, this is going to be one of these ugly SQL queries I need to write.

122
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And then I realized it's actually a single field in a single table that tells us this information.

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Right.

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The thing is, I had to do a bit of digging because as I suspect,

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there's a number of accidental Linux-only ones, and that's four of them are really Linux-only,

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but the build happens to fail on the other platforms, which is kind of funny.

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But sometimes the Linux builds actually succeed because the way they fail is

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they do certain availability tests for Apple platforms,

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and Linux just falls off and doesn't actually build anything.

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So it succeeds by doing nothing and the others fail.

131
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Right.

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For some obscure reasons.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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So that's four of them.

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And I think there are like three Linux-first packages that are clearly targeting Linux and

136
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don't happen to build on macOS, but probably would with a little bit of tweaking.

137
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And on that subject, I think it's as the popularity of the site grows,

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we see package authors pay attention to their compatibility results.

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And sometimes they'll pop in and raise an issue or pop into Discord or something

140
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and just raise like, oh, I was expecting it to compile here and it didn't.

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Now, I think we do a really good job of getting compatibility approximately right,

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but we can't get it 100% right for that number of packages.

143
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And so there are always going to be cases where package authors need to

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just kind of come in and take a quick look and see if their package results

145
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or their compatibility results expectation matches what we actually report.

146
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And I think as we become more popular and our usage grows,

147
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I think that will become less of a problem because people will be paying a little bit of attention.

148
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Because generally, once it's fixed up and once it's kind of working,

149
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it works forever.

150
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Like it's not something that...

151
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Yeah.

152
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You don't need some monitor your package compatibility results,

153
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but sometimes you do need to just kind of take a check.

154
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Is it doing what I expect it to do?

155
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Yeah, and an easy way to actually do check that and have an eye on it is if you stick the badge

156
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in your readme, because then even if you just look at the GitHub page,

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you have another chance of seeing whether it actually matches your expectations.

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In case anyone isn't familiar with that badge, you can put a shields.io badge on your readme file

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that reports the platform and the Swift compatibility status of your package.

160
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And to get that badge, if you...

161
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So as you add the package, it tells you how to get the badge at that point.

162
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And it is also on the package page, but it's kind of...

163
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The link is less obvious these days on the package page.

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So on the right hand side of your package page, towards the bottom of that column,

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you'll see a little bit of text that says something like

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information for package authors or something like that.

167
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And if you click on there, then you'll get some markdown from there where you can

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paste them to your readme to put those badges on your package page.

169
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And I'm always happy to see how many of those...

170
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I know you keep a track of how many you spend.

171
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Do you have a current count?

172
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I... Last I checked, it was 400.

173
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400.

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400 and a couple.

175
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That is pretty good, given 5,500 packages-ish.

176
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400, I'm very happy with that number.

177
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Yeah. Yeah, it's really great.

178
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That's it for the quiz.

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So 9 overall, that was two real Linux-only packages,

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which was clear because they tried to import glibc.

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Right.

182
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I guess those could also be made to work on macOS and three Linux-first packages.

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But yeah, it's a low number, but Linux at this time is not the most common platform

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for Swift yet, although it's probably widely used in the server space.

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Let's revisit this in a year and see how many Windows-only packages there are.

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All right.

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So if we're done with news...

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Let's do some package recommendations.

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I wonder if we get clashes again, because I think there's one that we probably both have

190
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picked, but let's see how it goes.

191
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Well, I'm going to start off with one that I've picked this week,

192
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because it changed its name.

193
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So we have a script that runs every night that looks for deleted packages.

194
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If it starts getting a 404 on the repository,

195
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or if we get a redirect on the repository, it notes that and it removes the old one

196
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and it adds the new one, that kind of thing.

197
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So I noticed one package author who is a very prolific package author, actually.

198
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It's Sindre Sorhus, and he renamed one of his packages from

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Preferences to Settings to match the new Apple terminology of now everything is settings,

200
00:12:39,280 --> 00:12:44,560
settings and nothing is preferences, to match the iPhone, I believe is where that came from.

201
00:12:44,560 --> 00:12:52,000
And he has a package called Settings Now, which is a macOS UI package to build a kind of standard

202
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looking tab bar at the top, window that resizes to fit your settings, standard settings window

203
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for any macOS app.

204
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And that's the kind of thing that, you know, I've built several macOS apps that maybe wouldn't

205
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have ever needed too many settings.

206
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And you just end up with, you know, maybe a settings window with one or two checkboxes,

207
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but it never looks quite right.

208
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And to actually get that functionality, especially if you are switching tabs between lots of

209
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different settings pages, it's quite a lot of work.

210
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And so this package is a nice little shortcut to save you the effort of building all that

211
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functionality.

212
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So whenever you switch tabs, it resizes the window to fit your new set of UI controls.

213
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You can add icons and text at the top.

214
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You can also have it in a segmented control style.

215
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So if you didn't want to use icons, you could just have a segmented control at the top.

216
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Really nice little package just to save you a whole lot of time building a standard looking

217
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consistent settings window.

218
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It is surprisingly difficult to layout settings.

219
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I have only this little app and it has a preferences window, settings window, and I'm never quite

220
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happy.

221
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I'm not super happy with the way it looks, but I just don't know what to do to make it

222
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look nice.

223
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I can tell if a settings window is really nicely laid out, but for the life of me, I

224
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can't, I can't steal the mechanics of actually getting there.

225
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It's really bizarre how difficult it can be to lay out a little bit of text and controls

226
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to make it look grouped.

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I always open a couple of different examples.

228
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Obviously this system settings, which is the preferences or the old system preferences,

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but also a company that always does a great job of settings windows is Panic.

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So if you open any of Panic's apps and open up their settings window, that I have one

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I put on my screen right now.

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It just looks right in every, every single panel that just looks really the correct design.

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And it's really hard to, to put into words what makes it correct.

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And I had a great hope actually for SwiftUI to kind of fix this because that takes away

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a lot of the layout stuff.

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And you have this, you only even have this control called form that you should be able

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to just pop a form in.

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And I was hoping desperately that it would give you a perfectly laid out settings window.

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The reality of that on Mac OS is not quite there yet.

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I don't think, and I think there's something about settings windows that, that form doesn't,

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I form, I don't think was intended to be just for settings windows.

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In fact, it certainly wasn't, but I hoped that it would do that job.

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And I think there's a little way to go yet before it can, it can do that.

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And at the moment it needs, it still needs manual layout for me.

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Yeah.

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It was a bit like the hope, like SF symbols for, for, you know, symbols and icons, because

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that's, that's a great, it baseline a lot of iconography in apps to a very solid baseline.

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And you don't get that same thing for, for layout and forms and stuff like that yet.

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And one day we will get the old Java applet dream of write once run anywhere.

250
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But today is not that day.

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Right.

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My first pick is called Popup View by Alisa Milnikova.

253
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And this is a, a package that allows you to display alerts, popups or toasts in your app.

254
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Why are they called toasts anyway?

255
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Do you know?

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I don't know why they're called toast, but that is a standard term for these.

257
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It's really bizarre.

258
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I first came across that when I worked in London and, you know, bigger company and all

259
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those terms started flying around and I never quite never stopped to ask why it's called

260
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that, but you know, toast is like a little banner at the top that displays something.

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And it's a really nice package.

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You can bring it in, has lots of different styles that you can pick from.

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And obviously there's always a bit of a risk delegating such a core element to a third

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party library.

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But one of the things I thought about when I looked at this package is there's a low

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risk way of introducing something like that.

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If you maybe initially deploy it for in-house error messages, you know, like when you are

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developing an app, you might want to surface all the network errors in detail in your debug

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builds or something like that.

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That might be a good way to start using a package, but that's not to say that this package

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would actually, you know, you would have to be careful because this has been around quite

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a bit.

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It's quite, it's quite popular, 2K stars, and it looks like a really nice package to

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handle that sort of thing for you.

275
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So that's PopupView by Alistair Melnikova.

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I did see this package and I think if you want toasts or, you know, whatever you want

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to call them in your app, then this is a fine package to use.

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But I also, every time I see these used in a real app, I wonder whether a toast was the

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right idea because it's a very easy way to just throw UI into a place where it can just

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be ignored almost.

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You can kind of have some UI come down from the top.

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And if you look at, I mean, I always look towards Apple's apps in terms of design.

283
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It's very rare that they use this type of control.

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I'm not going to say they never use it because I'm sure somebody will prove me wrong, but

285
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it's certainly, it's certainly rare.

286
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And I think with a package like this, not specific to this package, but with a concept

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like this, restraint is beneficial when using this.

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You can end up with apps, and I've seen apps that have so many toasts in them that they're

289
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kind of annoying.

290
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So yeah, that would be my only comment on that.

291
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Yeah, I mean, there's perhaps a reason why there isn't a native UI element for that.

292
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Right.

293
00:18:39,840 --> 00:18:42,400
But I do think there are cases where it's useful.

294
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And I realized that the other day when I was using Hivery, they mastered on client because

295
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what they do is they toast stuff in that would normally be a notification if you're not in

296
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app.

297
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And then it's actually quite nice because you're not pulled out of your current view.

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You get a chance to see what's happening.

299
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That is actually populating a little notification bubble for another view that you're not currently

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looking at.

301
00:19:06,160 --> 00:19:09,200
So I think that's a great use of it.

302
00:19:09,200 --> 00:19:09,440
Yes.

303
00:19:09,440 --> 00:19:14,400
It's too heavy for notification, but it's still interesting enough to actually be displayed

304
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immediately.

305
00:19:15,040 --> 00:19:19,120
I think that's a great use case for those kinds of things.

306
00:19:19,120 --> 00:19:23,840
My next package is another result builder.

307
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I think I've had a result, some kind of result builder for the last several weeks now.

308
00:19:29,440 --> 00:19:31,600
And this week is no different.

309
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My result builder this week is called Menu Builder and it's by Jed Fox.

310
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And it is a, again, it's a Mac OS package.

311
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Am I secretly building a Mac app?

312
00:19:41,440 --> 00:19:47,680
The answer is no, but I do seem to have picked a couple of Mac OS packages this week.

313
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So this is a result builder for NSMenu.

314
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And NSMenu is a relatively old API these days.

315
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And to be able to, in an AppKit application, just have a very SwiftUI-like menu item.

316
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And then inside a menu item, you can have a .view, which then gives you a SwiftUI view

317
00:20:09,920 --> 00:20:13,120
inside that menu item, separator items.

318
00:20:13,120 --> 00:20:20,240
And then, yeah, it's a great way to visualize your menu inside your code in an easier way

319
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than it would be with NSMenu in code directly.

320
00:20:24,400 --> 00:20:24,720
Nice.

321
00:20:24,720 --> 00:20:28,080
Would that work in menu bar items?

322
00:20:28,080 --> 00:20:29,920
Does that mention that or would you not?

323
00:20:29,920 --> 00:20:35,440
It doesn't mention it, but a menu bar item is just a menu.

324
00:20:35,440 --> 00:20:42,000
So it is, you can just pop a NSMenu into your menu bar app and that will work.

325
00:20:42,000 --> 00:20:49,440
So yeah, this is, I mean, I think SwiftUI now has support for menu bar apps as of the

326
00:20:49,440 --> 00:20:50,560
latest release.

327
00:20:50,560 --> 00:20:51,280
It does.

328
00:20:51,280 --> 00:20:55,680
And I'm actually, I've written one recently, but the reason I'm asking is you can't,

329
00:20:55,680 --> 00:21:00,800
there you can't mix like text menu items and views.

330
00:21:00,800 --> 00:21:01,600
Oh, interesting.

331
00:21:01,600 --> 00:21:05,520
So I used another package we talked about in the past to work around that.

332
00:21:05,520 --> 00:21:10,800
And the way it works around it is it recreates like text menu items on its own.

333
00:21:10,800 --> 00:21:12,720
So it's not using standard controls.

334
00:21:12,720 --> 00:21:16,080
It just mimics them and has like a control center look.

335
00:21:16,640 --> 00:21:21,120
And I was wondering if this package would allow the same thing, but using actually,

336
00:21:21,120 --> 00:21:25,840
I don't know what to call them, native menu items, you know, like buttons render into

337
00:21:25,840 --> 00:21:30,080
menu items like you would expect, which is other packages working around in different

338
00:21:30,080 --> 00:21:30,400
ways.

339
00:21:30,400 --> 00:21:31,040
I'm not sure.

340
00:21:31,040 --> 00:21:33,120
I might try it out and report back.

341
00:21:33,120 --> 00:21:33,360
Great.

342
00:21:33,360 --> 00:21:34,320
Right.

343
00:21:34,320 --> 00:21:39,840
My second package is called ContributorUI by Zia Scotti.

344
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And that's the one I thought you might've picked because it is a great UI to show

345
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GitHub contributors.

346
00:21:48,160 --> 00:21:53,600
And it looks a bit like the grid of avatars that we have on the Swift package index home

347
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page.

348
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You know, this little grid where you have the round avatars.

349
00:21:56,960 --> 00:22:00,320
You're correct that I would have picked this one if I'd have seen it, but it's right

350
00:22:00,320 --> 00:22:01,120
past me.

351
00:22:01,120 --> 00:22:03,280
Well, there's something for you then.

352
00:22:03,280 --> 00:22:08,000
So this shows the little round avatars, GitHub avatars.

353
00:22:08,000 --> 00:22:11,600
And I think this pulls mainly from code contributors.

354
00:22:11,600 --> 00:22:16,080
I'm not sure if you can actually configure that to have other contributor lists like

355
00:22:16,080 --> 00:22:21,120
from sponsors, but if it doesn't, perhaps that's extensible or I mean, it is open source

356
00:22:21,120 --> 00:22:24,640
might be something that could be added on, but it looks really nice.

357
00:22:24,640 --> 00:22:27,280
It's available on all platforms.

358
00:22:27,280 --> 00:22:34,720
So iOS, macOS being all in this case, I'm not sure there's a lot of use for that on

359
00:22:34,720 --> 00:22:41,120
to VOS, but although I suppose it could be, and yeah, it's a really nice little thing

360
00:22:41,120 --> 00:22:42,000
to pop in.

361
00:22:42,000 --> 00:22:48,160
I would also compliment this package on a great opening screenshot, which is always

362
00:22:48,160 --> 00:22:48,880
very important.

363
00:22:48,880 --> 00:22:53,600
If your package has any kind of visual element to it at all, this screenshot, if you haven't

364
00:22:53,600 --> 00:22:57,760
had a look at this package, go to package index and search on contributor UI.

365
00:22:57,760 --> 00:23:01,280
And that opening screenshot is really well designed.

366
00:23:01,280 --> 00:23:06,400
It shows one, two, three, three different uses of it on different platforms in light

367
00:23:06,400 --> 00:23:13,040
and dark mode, all in the space of what would be, you know, maybe 15 to 20 lines of text.

368
00:23:13,040 --> 00:23:15,840
That is a great opening image.

369
00:23:15,840 --> 00:23:19,520
Tells me almost everything I need to know before I even started reading the readme.

370
00:23:19,520 --> 00:23:20,320
Yeah, absolutely.

371
00:23:20,320 --> 00:23:22,320
And it's, you know, color matched.

372
00:23:22,320 --> 00:23:27,440
So the title color is like a brown, light brown, nice little gradient.

373
00:23:27,440 --> 00:23:29,040
It's like very tastefully done.

374
00:23:29,040 --> 00:23:30,560
It's a great readme intro.

375
00:23:30,560 --> 00:23:31,360
Yeah, it is.

376
00:23:31,360 --> 00:23:31,600
Yeah.

377
00:23:31,600 --> 00:23:32,080
So there you go.

378
00:23:32,080 --> 00:23:35,120
That's a contributor UI by Sirius Scottie.

379
00:23:35,120 --> 00:23:37,920
I hope I've got the first name pronounced correctly.

380
00:23:37,920 --> 00:23:44,400
So my last package for this week is one that's actually been around for a very long time.

381
00:23:44,400 --> 00:23:50,160
It's been in development for seven years and it's GeoSwift by the organization GeoSwift.

382
00:23:50,160 --> 00:23:56,400
But I can see that the primary authors are Andrew Kirschberger and Andrea Cremasi.

383
00:23:57,040 --> 00:24:05,920
And GeoSwift is a package that helps you handle geometric objects in code.

384
00:24:05,920 --> 00:24:12,720
So you can define areas, you can define points, you can define all sorts of different bits of

385
00:24:12,720 --> 00:24:17,520
geometry, and then you can do interesting things with those bits of geometry.

386
00:24:17,520 --> 00:24:22,720
So the example from the readme file is if you have two geometries, one, which is an

387
00:24:22,720 --> 00:24:28,880
outline of the country of Italy, and another one is a fairly arbitrary set of polygons,

388
00:24:28,880 --> 00:24:34,400
that, you know, there's an outer polygon and then an inner polygon cut out of the middle of it.

389
00:24:34,400 --> 00:24:41,040
You can, for example, intersect those two geometries to get just a new geometry, which is

390
00:24:41,040 --> 00:24:42,640
the intersection of those two.

391
00:24:42,640 --> 00:24:46,800
You could buffer a geometry, so you could expand it by a certain amount.

392
00:24:46,800 --> 00:24:49,200
You could difference a geometry.

393
00:24:49,200 --> 00:24:50,960
You can boundary a geometry.

394
00:24:50,960 --> 00:24:56,080
You can do all sorts of stuff that is quite tedious to do if you don't have some kind

395
00:24:56,080 --> 00:24:57,280
of library to help you do it.

396
00:24:57,280 --> 00:25:02,880
Yeah, I can imagine this can get super fiddly really fast if you want to do this on your own.

397
00:25:02,880 --> 00:25:05,680
That kind of stuff is fiendishly complicated.

398
00:25:05,680 --> 00:25:11,040
Yeah, and it's the kind of thing that you're not going to need to do this very often.

399
00:25:11,040 --> 00:25:16,000
But for example, if you're dealing with core location geofencing or something like that,

400
00:25:16,000 --> 00:25:21,760
a package like this where you just have that problem solved for you by this package,

401
00:25:21,760 --> 00:25:26,320
and the fact that it's been developed for seven years means it's on major version 10,

402
00:25:26,320 --> 00:25:30,320
which is why it popped into my feed this week.

403
00:25:30,320 --> 00:25:34,960
I did have a quick look at the release notes for 10, and there's nothing particularly notable.

404
00:25:34,960 --> 00:25:37,280
It's added some new functions.

405
00:25:37,280 --> 00:25:42,960
Looking at the history of the releases, it seems to be a release every year or so,

406
00:25:42,960 --> 00:25:46,320
something like that, and then maybe a couple of bug fixes after it.

407
00:25:46,320 --> 00:25:50,240
But certainly the last major version was 9, and that was a year ago.

408
00:25:50,240 --> 00:25:53,920
So yeah, it's a package that probably doesn't need updating every single week,

409
00:25:53,920 --> 00:25:58,560
which is also good, but it's the kind of thing that you might find useful if you need to do that job.

410
00:25:58,560 --> 00:25:58,880
Great.

411
00:25:58,880 --> 00:26:05,520
And my third pick is called Swift CLI version by Michael Lujuch.

412
00:26:05,520 --> 00:26:09,200
And this caught my eye because it actually does something that

413
00:26:09,200 --> 00:26:17,280
I've sort of manually been doing in a couple of packages, and that is the issue of a executable,

414
00:26:17,280 --> 00:26:22,000
and let's talk about command line executables maybe as an example, reporting its version.

415
00:26:22,000 --> 00:26:27,520
So for instance, you might have written a CLI command and you wanted to spit out its version,

416
00:26:27,520 --> 00:26:31,040
and that should typically be the latest git tag or whatever

417
00:26:31,040 --> 00:26:35,120
the revision was at the time of building that package.

418
00:26:35,120 --> 00:26:37,520
And that is a bit tricky to do, right?

419
00:26:37,520 --> 00:26:40,320
You don't want to do this manually, update some sort of file,

420
00:26:40,320 --> 00:26:43,200
and the way I've been doing that is run git describe,

421
00:26:43,200 --> 00:26:49,040
which gives you sort of the git version of your history and pipe it into a Swift file.

422
00:26:49,040 --> 00:26:53,680
So I have a template in my binary with a template version,

423
00:26:53,680 --> 00:26:56,560
you know, that just says something, you know, version not saved.

424
00:26:56,560 --> 00:27:02,160
And then from a make file, I sort of pipe the git describe over this file,

425
00:27:02,160 --> 00:27:06,880
sort of replacing that version so that it can be used in code to spit out the version.

426
00:27:06,880 --> 00:27:12,080
But obviously, that is all tied into having to run the builds,

427
00:27:12,080 --> 00:27:16,400
you know, the release builds through this make file to make sure that this is created

428
00:27:16,400 --> 00:27:18,800
in time for the build to absorb.

429
00:27:18,800 --> 00:27:21,600
So it can be done, but it can be a bit fiddly.

430
00:27:21,600 --> 00:27:26,080
And what this tool does, it is a build plugin that does all of that automatically.

431
00:27:26,080 --> 00:27:30,320
So you add the build plugin to your tool, and that can be a tool, it can be an app.

432
00:27:30,320 --> 00:27:35,680
And what it does, it creates that version.swift file as part of the build process

433
00:27:35,680 --> 00:27:39,680
every time, reliably, and then you have access to a variable,

434
00:27:39,680 --> 00:27:44,160
a global variable, just all caps version that you can use.

435
00:27:44,160 --> 00:27:46,640
And it's a string, an optional string, I think,

436
00:27:46,640 --> 00:27:52,560
that you can use in your, in all the places you might want to show exact version details.

437
00:27:52,560 --> 00:27:53,360
So that's really nice.

438
00:27:53,360 --> 00:27:58,080
It takes away, you know, the pain of having to set up that sort of make file based

439
00:27:58,080 --> 00:28:04,800
or whatever mechanism you use to mechanism to create this version file and does it for you.

440
00:28:04,800 --> 00:28:10,160
A really nice way, really nice use of a build tool plugin to get this result.

441
00:28:10,160 --> 00:28:12,080
But surely make files will last forever.

442
00:28:12,080 --> 00:28:13,280
I'm confident of that.

443
00:28:13,280 --> 00:28:17,760
Yeah, so that's Swift CLI version by Michael Husch.

444
00:28:17,760 --> 00:28:18,980
Great.

445
00:28:18,980 --> 00:28:21,600
So maybe we should wrap it up there.

446
00:28:21,600 --> 00:28:24,160
It's a slightly shorter than normal episode,

447
00:28:24,160 --> 00:28:26,560
but I think last time was a slightly longer than normal.

448
00:28:26,560 --> 00:28:29,360
So they do differ slightly.

449
00:28:29,360 --> 00:28:34,880
But what we'll do is we will be back in two weeks with some more news,

450
00:28:34,880 --> 00:28:38,080
hopefully some more significant news in a couple of weeks,

451
00:28:38,080 --> 00:28:41,440
and some more package recommendations, of course.

452
00:28:41,440 --> 00:28:44,400
Yeah, I'm sure we managed to balance it out with a longer episode again.

453
00:28:44,400 --> 00:28:45,760
So here we go.

454
00:28:45,760 --> 00:28:46,320
Exactly.

455
00:28:46,320 --> 00:28:46,820
Yeah.

456
00:28:46,820 --> 00:28:47,920
All right.

457
00:28:47,920 --> 00:28:48,720
So we'll see you then.

458
00:28:48,720 --> 00:28:49,600
See you in two weeks.

459
00:28:49,600 --> 00:28:50,240
Bye bye.

460
00:28:50,240 --> 00:28:50,800
Bye bye.