Xcode 16 SPM integration intermitently breaks with `xctest-dynamic-overlay` redirect

[NachoSoto]

See also #91.

Our project depends on this library, plus a few others from pointfreeco that also depend on xctest-dynamic-overlay.
Very frequently with Xcode 16.0 the SPM dependency graph gets in a broken state requiring a whole wipe of derived data:

github.com: https://github.com/pointfreeco/xctest-dynamic-overlay.git: The repository could not be found. Make sure a valid repository exists at the specified location and try again.

I think migrating all your libraries to point to the new swift-issue-reporting would fix this.

[NachoSoto]

Also pointing to swift-issue-reporting while using other dependencies that rely on xctest-dynamic-overlay doesn't work either:

multiple similar targets 'IssueReporting', 'IssueReportingTestSupport', 'XCTestDynamicOverlay' appear in package 'swift-issue-reporting' and 'xctest-dynamic-overlay', this may indicate that the two packages are the same and can be de-duplicated by using mirrors. if they are not duplicate consider using the moduleAliases parameter in manifest to provide unique names

[stephencelis]

@NachoSoto We unfortunately discovered that SPM packages don't fully support redirects in this fashion after releasing the update. While the most common case worked, there were many package graph edge cases that we needed to account for. We have encountered the resolution bug you refer to above, though luckily it's intermittent and can usually be resolved with a derived data purge, as annoying as it is.

At the core of it, SPM does not honor package renames and only seems to fully support organization renames. As such we plan on doing what we did with swiftui-navigation's migration to swift-navigation, which is to ship swift-issue-reporting as a new library with effectively a 2.0 starting point and keep XCTestDynamicOverlay in an older xctest-dynamic-overlay repo/package. We plan on doing this in the near future, but it is a delicate procedure and we don't want to break folks downstream, so we need to think through all the scenarios and make sure we're accounting for them.

I'll leave this issue open to track the migration, thanks!

[NachoSoto]

I appreciate the quick response. It's unfortunate as SPM's Xcode integration seems to have been unmaintained for years now.

A full derived data purge is a huge productivity kill for any large codebase though, so I hope you consider doing this migration in the shorter term, especially considering that this seems to be getting even worse on Xcode 16.1.

[jorgealegre]

Subscribing to this issue :)

[mredig]

My project won't resolve dependencies with a full derived data and spm cache nuke due to this issue. The project has a dependency on swift-snapshot-testing (commit b467f413c83e2ceba59ba798583a1c57db9700cb) which hops skips and jumps to xctest-dynamic-overlay, somewhere relying on a branch that doesn't exist on THIS repo.

Some context from the spm resolve logs in case that helps:

Fetching from https://github.com/pointfreeco/swift-snapshot-testing

Fetching from https://github.com/pointfreeco/xctest-dynamic-overlay

could not find a branch named ‘test-traits’ in https://github.com/pointfreeco/xctest-dynamic-overlay2025-05-10 00:19:55.199 xcodebuild[12850:99858] Writing error result bundle to /var/folders/1r/ygnzvwjn7r5dnz00_rlwjxkh0000gn/T/ResultBundle_2025-10-05_00-19-0055.xcresult
xcodebuild: error: Could not resolve package dependencies:
  could not find a branch named ‘test-traits’ in https://github.com/pointfreeco/xctest-dynamic-overlay

[twocentstudios]

Has anyone found a reliable workaround to this issue? I thought my package list was pretty simple (sharing-grdb, swift-identified-collections, swift-tagged), but I'm still running into this issue every time Xcode starts or any time Resolve Package Dependencies is called by an outside tool.

[tfe]

@twocentstudios I was able to resolve it by removing my project's package dependency on swift-snapshot-testing and replacing it with the original name xctest-dynamic-overlay as described here: pointfreeco/swift-snapshot-testing#949 (comment).

[twocentstudios]

@tfe Thanks! My problem turned out to be a little different.

I just figured out that when I added the SharingGRDB package to my xcodeproj (a month ago), for some reason Xcode added a reference for xctest-dynamic-overlay to the Frameworks folder in the xcodeproj:

Once I deleted that reference package resolution succeeds as expected.

I overlooked it at the time and it seems like that's what was causing this wild thrashing during package resolution.

Apologies for reviving this thread with an unrelated issue but hopefully anyone else that runs into it can fix it quicker than me.