Exclude derived data folders from from Xcode

[mdab121]

No description provided.

[stevegrunwell]

Thank you for the addition!

[stevegrunwell]

The tests failing here made me dig deeper, and I'm hoping someone with Xcode experience can help provide context.

From what I've read, Xcode will store build artifacts in the DerivedData/ directory, and this is usually(?) at a system-wide level (e.g. ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData) — is this correct? If so, Asimov would be better-served blocking that directory.

As it stands now, the code in this PR tells Asimov "Look for a DerivedData directory that sits adjacent to...itself", which seems like a roundabout way of saying "Block all DerivedData directories from Time Machine backups. However, that runs counter to Asimov's more conservative "make sure there's a matching dependency file so we don't block anything accidentally" ethos.

Granted, "DerivedData" seems very unlikely to be anything else on a developer's machine (save for perhaps some Swift developer's musical side-project), but I'd like to better understand this directory before including it in Asimov, please.

[mdab121]

Hey!

Thanks for the response. You're right, that the DerivedData folder (which is basically build artifacts, indexes, etc) are located at ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData by default.

However it's very common to have it in the project directory. I do that as an iOS developer, and I know many other devs that do. That's why it's also listed in the default .gitignore for XCode.

It's really a time machine killer, because these tend to be ~1GB even for a simple XCode project.

---

What i can suggest is to make it conditional to exclude DerivedData unless an XCode project file exists in the directory? Which would be anything like *.xcodeproj.

[stevegrunwell]

What i can suggest is to make it conditional to exclude DerivedData unless an Xcode project file exists in the directory? Which would be anything like *.xcodeproj.

I think that makes the most sense, but it'll require refactoring how the find command is utilized within Asimov, as test -e checks for the existence of a file, but doesn't account for wildcards.

We want to make sure that whatever we do here is still performant, but adding wildcard support would open up some opportunities.