TNS Doctor should check CocoaPods/Ruby version

[burkeholland]

I noticed that Ruby can wreak absolute havoc on a project when using CocoaPods. The wrong version (< 2.0.0) will throw cryptic errors that make people feel sad.

It would be nice if TNS doctor could...

1. Detect existence of CocoaPods (Mac only of course)
2. Detect version of Ruby and warn if the version is known to be incompatible

[burkeholland]

Why can't I add a label to this issue? GitHubbing is hard.

[teobugslayer]

@burkeholland,

We generally avoid to deal with dependencies of dependencies, because once you start this way, there's no end. CocoaPods site clearly states that CocoaPods is built with Ruby and is installable with the default Ruby available on OS X. We recommend you use the default ruby. We cannot guarantee that we or our dependencies work on broken machines.

Otherwise, we check for CocoaPods existence: https://github.com/NativeScript/nativescript-cli/blob/master/lib/services/doctor-service.ts#L49

[burkeholland]

Understood. However, let me provide the feedback that as a developer, I would have bailed on this endeavor and would have mentally blamed {N} out of ignorance. I'm convinced that our ability to smooth our the developer experience is paramount. Throwing cryptic errors about sandbox-pod and then expecting the developer to figure it out on their own is going to cause abandonment.

Maybe we could provide better error handling in the build where pods are added?

[hshristov]

tns doctor did not show me that I was missing pod. It throws exception that ANDROID_HOME is not set correctly although I was using tns emulate ios

[teobugslayer]

I agree that we must check whether CocoaPods works robustly. I disagree that checking for particular version of Ruby brings value, because there can be millions of others issues which prevents CocoaPods from working. Imho, a better approach is to add a dummy pod into a dummy project and see if everything works. But this may not be easily doable.

[teobugslayer]

@hshristov, this was fixed in 4834e80 and is included in the upcoming CLI 1.5.2 release.

[hshristov]

@teobugslayer, Great.

Thanks