Siesta as dependency in SwiftPM on linux

Question

I have written a package that consumes Siesta, and I would like to be able to run automated tests for it on a linux platform using SwiftPM. I see that siesta has a Package.swift which declares the exclusion of SiestaUI, however I see that the AppKit/UIKit import for the standard transformers -> Image type is used widely, and UIImage references failed to compile on linux.

Further, I would specifically like my consuming library to deal with images coming from Siesta. At a minimum, I would need to inject UIKit methods that are capable of consuming Siesta's types, from the consumer.

So, (1) is there any expectation that Siesta can be used with SwiftPM on linux? If so, what is the intended flow here? It seems like PureSwift/Cacao and Silica could be a shim to help me out here, but my experiments aren't wiring up right somehow, and the translation between the different domain types isn't obvious (i.e., I want to use Siesta to transmit a jpeg of an image, but Cacao does't offer an implementation of UIImageJPEGRepresentation).

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Siesta on Linux is currently not officially unsupported, due to lack of demand and no clear use cases (until now!). The Package.swift is aspirational, placed in the hopes that some enterprising person like you cares to take it up and make it work!

The core Siesta module should in theory work just fine on Linux. The SiestaUI module is intended to be iOS/macOS-only, which is why the SwiftPM manifest excludes it.

Siesta’s own tests don’t work with SwiftPM because, at last check, the test libraries on which they depend don't support SwiftPM.