Request for Support: Integration of OpenTelemetry Swift SDK via XCFramework

[shahianshu]

Hello Team,

At Uber, we are working on integrating the opentelemetry-swift library to enable context propagation and tracing in our iOS applications. However, since our internal policy only permits the inclusion of open-source libraries via XCFramework files, integrating the opentelemetry-swift SDK has become a challenge.

Currently, we rely on a manual process to generate the XCFramework file.
Below are the steps used for obtaining XCFramework file

1. xcodebuild -scheme OpenTelemetryApi -sdk iphoneos -configuration Release
   BUILD_LIBRARY_FOR_DISTRIBUTION=YES ARCHS=arm64 BUILD_DIR=./Build -destination "generic/platform=iOS"
2. pushd Build/Release-iphoneos 
3. ar -crs libOpenTelemetryApi.a OpenTelemetryApi.o
4. popd
5. xcodebuild -scheme OpenTelemetryApi -sdk iphonesimulator -configuration Release BUILD_LIBRARY_FOR_DISTRIBUTION=YES ARCHS=arm64 BUILD_DIR=./Build -destination "generic/platform=iOS Simulator"
6. pushd Build/Release-iphonesimulator 
7. ar -crs libOpenTelemetryApi.a OpenTelemetryApi.o
8. Popd
9. pushd Build
10. xcodebuild -create-xcframework -library Release-iphonesimulator/libOpenTelemetryApi.a -library Release-iphoneos/libOpenTelemetryApi.a -allow-internal-distribution -output OpenTelemetryApi.xcframework
11. popd

We aim to streamline this process to reduce manual intervention and associated risks.
Looking forward to your suggestions or any official support to simplify and optimize the integration of the opentelemetry-swift SDK.

Thank you

[nachoBonafonte]

The main problem for delivering a xcframework as part of the project is that the distribution libraries needed by each project/application are different, also the deployment targets can differ. Some users only want the API, others want URLSessionInstrumentation, and others want also OTLP exporting. Building each target as a different xcframework is also error prone and uses way more memory than if linked in a single binary entity. There was in the past an initiative to create a script to build several libraries as an xcframework and including but was missing several options and was abandoned.