build: remove --xcode configure switch

[bnoordhuis]

./configure --xcode ostensibly let you built with the Xcode IDE but
it has never been tested regularly since its introduction in 2012 and
probably has been broken for years. Remove it.

Fixes: #20324

[benjamingr]

@bnoordhuis so, I just tested this locally and building with xcode almost works fine fine (though it takes a lot more time than regular make -j4). It doesn't look like it's too hard to fix - that said - I've never even realized this was a feature and never used it.

Pinging @nodejs/platform-macos to see if anyone has a strong opinion about removing it since it currently works (at least for me).

[bnoordhuis]

For background, the --xcode switch depends on gyp's xcode generator. That generator never got much love even when gyp was still maintained upstream, let alone now. The most recent bug fix is from 3 or 4 years ago.

[targos]

CI: https://ci.nodejs.org/job/node-test-pull-request/14521/

[joyeecheung]

I have used it before and it worked just fine. Have not used it for quite a while but I don’t see a reason removing it? If we don’t want bug reports, emitting a warning about it being not supported should be fine. Whoever needs it can figure it out or fix the bug themselves, much like how we treat the android build files.

[joyeecheung]

Making my -1 explicit

[bnoordhuis]

You'll still be able to select the xcode generator with ./configure -- -f xcode. That's how you select the eclipse generator, for example, which is in a similar state of neglect.

[joyeecheung]

LGTM since /configure -- -f xcode works

[BridgeAR]

Landed in a9051bb 🎉

[thlorenz]

Just running into this now and can confirm that building via Xcode is broken on current master.
However I used this feature heavily, i.e. to debug async-hooks while we were implementing them.
Without Xcode I would have taken a much longer time to understand how things work and discover the reasons for bugs that we encountered.

I just confirmed that things still build fine on the v8.x branch, so unlike stated, this actually did work until recently. Thus this is a regression that got fixed by removing the flag that made it easily accessible.

I understand that lldb exists as an option, but in a lot of cases the Xcode IDE makes it a lot easier to navigate code, inspect variables, etc. especially if debugging Node.js features and v8 API integration.
Obviously it's importance is only clear to us who are actually using Xcode.

I hope this will get fixed properly even if Xcode users seem to be in the minority :)

To be clear, removing the flag is not the problem, but releasing a new version with this regression doesn't seem to be the right thing to do IMHO and should be remedied.

[MylesBorins]

@thlorenz do you have any time to dig in and see if you can fix building with xcode?

[thlorenz]

@MylesBorins not ATM, but if this doesn't get fixed until I do I can have a look.
Parts of the breakage seems to be related to OpenSSL upgrade, so fixing could be a bit complex ;)

[joyeecheung]

@thlorenz By the way if you want to use a GUI frontend for lldb debugging (that's basically what the Xcode debugger does), vscode-lldb works pretty well (although I have not found a way to bring the lldb command line prompt out so I cannot use llnode in vscode like what I used to do in Xcode).

EDIT: oh llnode in vscode actually works in the debug console. I guess I just have not used it enough to figure that out..

[rvagg]

I had a bit of a play with this because I figured the openssl failures shouldn't be hard to fix since they were only recently introduced, and yes, they were easy to fix (once I figured out what the problem was). Unfortunately there's still a node_js2c shell script error and a v8_inspector_compress_protocol_json shell script error, probably introduced not too long ago but not noticed by the core team because nobody around here uses xcode for core.

I doubt this is too hard to fix, it might just be a matter of fixing paths in a gyp file or something, but I don't have time to figure these next steps out right now so I'm going to have to leave this on the floor for now. If anyone here, @thlorenz or others, want to tackle this, here's my branch with the openssl fixes and a revert of this commit: https://github.com/rvagg/io.js/tree/rvagg/reinstate-xcode-support

[zhuyingda]

Hi @thlorenz do you find any workaround to debug nodejs by using XCode IDE so far?
I have same problem too, and I am just the minority Xcode user you have mentioned. >.<

[thlorenz]

No, but I haven't tried either so I cannot be of much help at this point.