Question: What are the TranslateKitMacros doing?

[frogg]

Hey,
I just wanted to add your Swift package to my app to give it a try, and I was wondering why I need to approve Xcode to run some macros?

Thanks a lot for clarifying & have a great day!
– Frederik

[Jeehut]

Hey Frederik, thank you for the question!

The #tk macro is explained here and auto-generates a translation key based on your current context to help with more accurate localization even without comments and to group your keys together which also helps with accuracy and makes translating also more convenient for a human translator or developer.

The Xcode thing asking for permission even if you don't have any macros in your projects (and also way too often!) is really inconvenient and I just reported it as a bug. It should not ask for permission if you don't use them. And macros are also quite restricted, there's only so much you can do. But technically it's possible to do bad things. Not that I would ever do that or allow anyone to merge something in that would do that.

But macros can be super useful and the #tk macro I think is a great example of that, as it saves you a lot of typing and improves translation accuracy and makes finding keys more convenient at the same time at basically no cost for the developer (just a few chars added around translations). You can find it's full implementation here.

I hope this answers your question. Let me know if this is a blocker for you, maybe I can provide a target that doesn't rely on the Macros target for people who don't want to use them.

Sorry for the late reply, by the way. I somehow didn't get / missed the notification in my inbox.

[Jeehut]

Apart from what I said above, I just introduced Lite variants of each target so you can opt-out of macros when needed. This was released in version 1.2.0 and the README was updated accordingly. This question should be addressed now.