unable to find utility *, not a developer tool or in PATH

[rolfbjarne]

Steps to Reproduce

1. Ensure the system Xcode (as defined by xcode-select -p) points to a different Xcode than Visual Studio for Mac.
2. Execute xcrun -k
3. Create an iOS project, makes sure it has multiple architectures selected (and device-specific builds disabled), and build it.

Result:

lipo : error : unable to find utility "lipo", not a developer tool or in PATH

The error can be reproduced directly on the command line as well:

xcrun -k
$ DEVELOPER_DIR=/Applications/Xcode92.app XCODE_DEVELOPER_DIR_PATH=/Applications/Xcode93.app/Contents/Developer xcrun lipo
xcrun: error: unable to find utility "lipo", not a developer tool or in PATH

The problem is the XCODE_DEVELOPER_DIR_PATH environment variable, which confuses Apple's tooling (when building an XI or XM project the variable is inherited from Visual Studio for Mac, which sets it).

Workarounds

• Make sure the system Xcode and the VSfM Xcode is the same.

• Run xcrun once without the variable (per broken tool) so that the tool's path is cached:

  $ xcrun -k
  $ xcrun clang --version
  Apple LLVM version 9.0.0 (clang-900.0.39.2)
  [...]
  $ DEVELOPER_DIR=/Applications/Xcode92.app XCODE_DEVELOPER_DIR_PATH=/Applications/Xcode93.app/Contents/Developer xcrun clang --version
  Apple LLVM version 9.0.0 (clang-900.0.39.2)
  [...]

Potential fixes

1. Make mtouch and mmp unset XCODE_DEVELOPER_DIR_PATH unconditionally.
2. Make VSfM unset XCODE_DEVELOPER_DIR_PATH. Presumably there's a reason it's set in the first place, so this might be non-trivial.

I think making mtouch and mmp unset the variable is the simplest and fastest to implement.

[madhurig]

Is there a way to change "VS for Mac" Xcode settings without going through the UI? We have a customer running into this on the VSTS Hosted macOS VMs and we are looking for a way to switch the "VS for mac" default via a script.

Thanks,
Madhuri

[rolfbjarne]

@madhurig it's stored in ~/Library/Preferences/Xamarin/Settings.plist:

$ cat ~/Library/Preferences/Xamarin/Settings.plist 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>AppleSdkRoot</key>
	<string>/Applications/Xcode93.app</string>
</dict>
</plist>

[DelcoigneYves]

I managed to work around it on our build system by reading out the path located in the Settings.plist, and setting the DEVELOPER_DIR environment variable to this path, appended with "/Contents/Developer".

[VincentDondain]

@rolfbjarne we might also want to create an IDE issue. The IDE could get the Xcode path from xcode-select -p and also set a new Xcode path with xcode-select -s from the UI. What do you think?

[rolfbjarne]

@VincentDondain yes, that's another solution that should work just as fine.

[VincentDondain]

Also it's what Xcode does.