Open Radar

 
Apple Developer Tools Team,

I'm doing some work integrating Interface Builder tools like the asset catalog compiler and XML Interface Builder document compiler into an external build system. Part of the core way in which we track dependencies is by knowing in advance which output files will be generated as a result of a particular command execution.

For the asset catalog compiler, there's already a helpful XML output with the "com.apple.actool.compilation-results" key that lists the output files generated by a particular execution. However, this requires us to effectively run the same invocation twice: once to get the list of output files, and again to do the actual compilation, which is redundant and wastes time due to the unnecessary disk I/O.

I would like to suggest adding a --dry-run option to actool that would run the normal compilation process except that it doesn't actually write any of the listed output files to disk (but still lists the files it *would* have written in the output). This should be trivial to implement and would be a huge help to us. It would be nice if ibtool could get the same treatment as well (for compiling XIBs and Storyboards) -- and ibtool also needs a "com.apple.ibtool.compilation-results" listing in its output.

Thanks!