SPM Package.swift manifest causes CI failures due to unnecessary dependencies

[KaiOelfke]

For clients of the Adjust SDK that only use AdjustSdk there are issues due to SPM resolving and loading all dependencies. In this case this means also loading https://github.com/googleads/google-ads-on-device-conversion-ios-sdk.git which has it's own dependencies and is a big enough download to regularly fail Xcode Cloud CI.

xcodebuild: error: Could not resolve package dependencies:   failed downloading 'https://dl.google.com/firebase/ios/appads/3.2.0/GoogleAdsOnDeviceConversion.zip' which is required by binary target 'GoogleAdsOnDeviceConversion': downloadError("The request timed out.")   fatalError

There's other issues discussing problems with this dependency and it being perhaps even deprecated:

#765

To avoid CI failures and for faster SPM resolves Adjust should alternatively publish a minimized fork with just the AdjustSDK. Perhaps also with a more suitable name as discussed in #500.

RevenueCat also has a dedicated repo for SPM to speedup things. See https://github.com/RevenueCat/purchases-ios-spm.

[genadyb]

Hello, @KaiOelfke.
Thank you for sharing your feedback.

How often is the mentioned above download failing in your Xcode Cloud CI setup?
Have you checked any possible DNS/etc. restriction/etc. issues?
It looks weird - the GoogleAdsOnDeviceConversion.zip dependency is not huge.

Could you please also elaborate how, for your opinion, RevenueCat approach may help with dependency downloading issue?
As far as we understand they created an SPM mirror repo to reduce its own size. (BTW, according to our checks the diff between two repos is not insane - 42 vs 34 Mb).
And the differences are not related to contained SPM packages - they are equal.

Of course, there is an option to create a new repo with no dependency to Google ODM at all, but I'm not sure about the relevancy of this solution from our perspective - we will check it internally.

If you have any optimization proposals, you are very welcome to share them here.
We are always happy to improve our product and open to such suggestions.

Thank you.

[KaiOelfke]

How often is the mentioned above download failing in your Xcode Cloud CI setup?

Unfortunately I don't have the time or tooling to give an exact answer, but I'd say 1/3 to 1/4 of CI builds fail like that.

Have you checked any possible DNS/etc. restriction/etc. issues?

Xcode Cloud doesn't offer a lot of control. It's managed by Apple. But it's the designated CI platform for Apple platform apps.

Could you please also elaborate how, for your opinion, RevenueCat approach may help with dependency downloading issue?

SPM does full history clones of git repos so it's slow. For https://github.com/googleads/google-ads-on-device-conversion-ios-sdk this doesn't matter as it doesn't contain sources or much files, but only binaries. But it has further dependencies with source code like nanopb and google utilities.

The main issue is that it's bad that Adjust generates unused dependency bloat for us. So that's why we for now maintain a fork with only the Adjust SDK targets we need. Probably there's also more overhead with Xcode and SPM with these dependencies as they'll get indexed and maybe compiled. If GoogleAdsOnDeviceConversion, Google Utilities or nanopb adds more it'll even grow further.

Adjust could also maintain such a fork for it's other SDK consumers who don't need these dependencies.

[genadyb]

@KaiOelfke
Thank you for you answer.
We will discuss it internally and update you soon.