Anyone having issues with xcode and VPP?

[AJPinto]

Our support team has been complaining about issues installing Xcode from selfservice for a few months. On the JAMF side of things no errors to speak off, all the management commands do their thing without issue. In the lab I can install xcode but it takes a long while. Most of our users are remote with a much slower network connection to my lab, and add the VPN to complicate things. 

Downloading Xcode from apples developer site and it took about 15min on the VPN to download which is fine. However, the xip has been decompressing for over an hour. It does not appear to be frozen, just taking forever. I'm wondering if Xcode has finally gotten too big for Apples distribution methods.

I have a test device at my house on the VPN and I was able to install Xcode in about 2 hours which seems fine. Could just be a users not having patience and there really being no useful progress bar. Anyone else having similar "issues" or experience to share?

[donmontalvo]

Self Service for big VPP apps is painful. Pushing it using VPP is less of a PITA.

Its like watching a pot of water boil, vs not.

[AJPinto]

Ha, ya. Tell me about it. In My lab I have an AppStore policy to just automatically install xcode. However with the size of xcode I prefer to let users click the button if needed though I may need to change my stance on that. I decided to start force caching macOS upgrades with Catalina, I may as well with Xcode now as well. These things are just getting too large for people to wait patiently especially without any real progress notification. 

Our support guy is one of those types if he cannot watch it beginning to finish it MUST be broken. So things that take 2-4+ hours are absolutely 100% broken, no ifs ands or buts. 

[efil4xiN]

@AJPinto, Hey @donmontalvo ,

We had a small offshore team with a  less than desirable connection. Posting the following, perhaps it may help now or in the future. the split command can be used on additional file types

1. Used the split command to break the xip file into chunks ( like rar )

$ split 5000m /tmp/Xcode

you will get files; xaa, xab,xac..etc

2. wrap the "chunks " in a dmg ( single line loop)

$ls -f /private/tmp/Xcode| grep xa | while read -r file; do hdiutil create -srcfolder /private/tmp/Xcode/$file -fs HFS+ /Users/Shared/$file.dmg; done

3. create a policy with all 23 chunks to deploy the dmg to /tmp

4.Reassemble chunks back to xip ( local on the endpoint)

$cat /tmp/x?? > /Users/Shared/Xcode.xip

at this point most have soem type of xcodepost-install script that kicks in

5. added clean up to postinstall

[AJPinto]

I have been trying to avoid manually distributing Xcode because of how large it has gotten (10GB xip, and 30gb uncompressed). Something that big has way too many chances to go wrong, especially in an enterprise network. I was not away of the split binary, I will give that a look in to. Thanks.

[MatthewGC]

Deploying xcode has been a complete mess for me as well. I tried lots of ways of trying to package it but it would be very hit and miss, largely uploading was the issue more than anything because of it's size. I switched to VPP but now that seems broken with 12.5.1. Most of my devs were able to allow Jamf to auto-update Xcode when they upgraded to BigSur but now that I'm trying to upgrade one of our build servers I'm seeing self-service just give me a very helpful error. No details and I can't find any details in any of the logs to give me any more information. Right now I'm downloading the XIP so I can manually install it but that's not a long-term solution.

[robertojok]

I am having the same problem!!!!! cannot install automatically or via self service!!!!