

I don't see the point of CocoaPods, but would love to be convinced. - moshberm
http://blog.mosheberman.com/why-i-dont-use-cocoapods/

======
thoran
On MacOS, you would distribute a library as a 'Framework' (a package
containing the binary shared object, headers, documentation, resources, sub
frameworks...). In Xcode, you can quickly add a framework dependency. And if
you need to modify the framework too, you can use “sub projects” (the sub
project build the framework you are using in the super project). With recent
Xcode versions, it works reasonably well. In this world, you don't need
CocoaPods at all. Everything is nicely compositional. You would have expected
that they had extended this mechanism when they introduced the iPhone?

But they manage to totally screw that. First of all, they drop the support for
Frameworks!! So if you want to ship a cross platform (MacOS/iOS) library, you
must maintain two targets (one static lib for iOS (and good luck to manage its
inner resources), one framework for MacOS). You also have to be careful to
have compatible architecture between the sub project and the parent project, a
problem that is aggravated by the multiplication of iOS architectures (armv 5,
6, 7, 8, 9, ...). Apparently, forwarding the required architectures from a
parent project down to its dependant sub projects is a very difficult
problem...

Then, the community feels the need to fix this mess to have a working
environment where you can easily share your work: CocoaPods was born.

~~~
moshberm
Why is CocoaPods better than git submodules?

