[RFC] Workspace generation

I wanted to open the discussion around workspace generation and dependencies - opening a new task for the issue for a more concrete discussion.

To support making applications as modular as possible we would want a app/project.yml file to be able to specify a dependency on another lib/project.yml file. Looking at the way buck refers to dependencies in the BUCK file (bazel does something similar bazel ) they go with the approach of //<relative path>:<project-name>. Doing this would require users to generate their projects from the root of their source code and passing in the path to XcodeGen.

As an example lets assume we have a folder structure like this.

apps/
  app_1/
    ...
    dependencies:
      - //libs/libs_1
      - //libs/libs_3
    ...
  app_2/
    ...
    dependencies:
      - //libs/libs_2
    ...
libs/
  lib_1/
    ...
    dependencies:
      - //libs/libs_2
    ...
  lib_2/
    ...
    ...
  lib_3/
    ...
    ...
Carthage/
  ...

We could achieve this by introducing a new project dependency type which takes in a string prefixed with // and generating an .xcodeproject per project.yml and all of its dependencies.
Running XcodeGen //apps/app_1 would generate a workspace for app_1 at apps/app_1/App_1.xcworkspace as well as .xcproject in the desired project folder and all dependency folders. The workspace structure would mimic the folder structure defined in the directory.

• .xcodeproject - having nested projects might break things or make it more complex.
• Framework linking will be done through implicit dependencies in the .xcworkspace

Questions:

• Is this something XcodeGen should/wants to be able to do?
• Is this approach too opinionated?

Start with the XcodeGen CLI invocation and the project.yml dependency examples described in the issue. No source files or tests are identified; the work is not ready until the workspace-generation approach and dependency semantics are agreed and an implementation scope is defined.