Open Radar

 
Summary:
Xcode is a primary tool for the development on all Apple platforms. People can either love or hate it, the fact is it's still the most powerful development tool around.

    Lots of its power and usefulness has been achieved by 3rd-party plugins, later covered by the Alcatraz project, which is the number one extension management system for Xcode, as vital and needed as for example npm is needed for Node.js. It's all based on a fair, aware community developing its helpful open-source extras and publishing them on GitHub. It's not a code-injecting ghetto targeting infecting stuff. It's a community within a community.

    Xcode 8 tends to drop support for these plugins, most often being narrated as a security step in favour of preventing distribution of injected stuff. This is false; you simply can't prevent that 'cause there's always someone who finds the way. This step simply makes Xcode was less usable, complicated and not that feature-rich. There are many important plugins which developers love, contribute and move forward to make Xcode even better, tell yourself honestly, mostly even better than you could in a short period.

    The community needs powerful stuff. Way more powerful than basic source-editing magic. Please reconsider this step in a spirit of community and support to your developers.

    In last years, there's a move towards closing your platform. First shutting down Spotlight plugins and its great Flashlight plugins manager, which is simply great and now I need to disable Rootless to use it. Now it's Xcode plugins. You're doing more and more to make developers and power users feel sad and not having their computing device in their hands.

    There's a detailed discussion on Alcatraz repo, it says everything:
    https://github.com/alcatraz/Alcatraz/issues/475

    I'm attaching a list of great plugins I simply can't spend a day without:
    AutoHighlightSymbol - Add highlights to the currently selected token
    ClangFormat – code formatter
    DerivedData Exterminator – daily need getting rid or bad stuff
    FuzzyAutocomplete – name says it all, still more powerful than Xcode completion
    KZLinkedConsole - be able to click on a link in the console to open the relevant file and be faster to debug
    PreciseCoverage - nicer gui than xcode provides to view the coverage
    XcodeColors - shows colors in the console depending on log level (how else should a console be used?)


    Most of them are not source code-related, thus deserve having a way to be loaded and working like a charm again.

If you do not make a fast step to support your community i'm sure we will find another platform to work with.

Steps to Reproduce:
Install Xcode 8

Expected Results:
Package manager available,
extensions should provide 100x more API to allow all above mentioned plugins to be supported

Actual Results:
No package manager available, we have to disable code signing of xcode 8 to still be able to load plugins

Version:
XCode 8

Notes:


Configuration:
Macbook pro

Attachments: