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by _mlxl 1885 days ago
I want people who haven't used Xcode to understand that this isn't a connection issue, there is something specifically weird happening with Xcode when you try to upgrade it.

It has to be wed to the OS in such a way that makes the propensity for this vague failure state to occur, because I've never had it happen with anything else.

Upgrading from the App Store sometimes will hang at 99% and no matter what you do save some weird incantations to remove stuff from this secret App Store cache to remove the download to begin its excruciatingly slow download again, only with the hope in your heart this impenetrable and silent error doesn't happen again.

And of course none of this is addressed by Apple. You think you can just download versions from the developer site? Well enjoy, and I am not joking, a 30+ minute unzipping of the .xip file (yep that's right, it's not a .zip).

Apple does not care about it's developer ecosystem, even though you are such a huge part of it's success. It's apparent in their thread bare documentation, their terrible tools, their greedy practises.

I get it. They are a business. But they do not deserve their halo.

1 comments

It used to be a zip, there’s a reason why they changed it to xip
That reason being digital signatures. You can get the same confidence from posting an MD5 hash to check. Xips are an awful solution to fix a solved problem.
Absolutely no one will bother to do the check.
The reason is stupid for the problem it solves.