Thanks for the great issue report! Should we not be adding those for macOS projects?

Thanks, it was a team effort connecting all the dots of what was causing this.

My opinion would be no-- we should not add rpath references for outside the bundle, at least not by default. Especially something that is a reference to the Xcode Swift toolchain ("${DT_TOOLCHAIN_DIR}/usr/lib/swift/${PLATFORM_NAME}", /usr/lib/swift), since you can't count on it in a production environment. That's something maybe a user should only be manually adding to a Debug build configuration.

The PR you linked allows to build and run app specs or test specs that do not contain Swift but their libraries do. Having a .swift file in a target causes Xcode to copy a bunch of stuff. Its possible we can limit this only to app specs and test specs...

are you using app specs for a macOS target?

I figured there must be some kind of use case for it so adding a condition to preserve it would make sense.

I'm not familiar with using app specs, we're not using them to my knowledge. Here's the Podfile if it helps answer the question:

# Uncomment the next line to define a global platform for your project
platform :osx, '10.12'

target '<APPNAME>' do
  # Comment the next line if you're not using Swift and don't want to use dynamic frameworks
  use_frameworks!

  # Pods for <APPNAME>

end

target '<APPEXNAME>' do
  # Comment the next line if you're not using Swift and don't want to use dynamic frameworks
  use_frameworks!

  # Pods for <APPEXNAME>
  pod 'TLDExtract'
  pod 'SnapKit', '5.0.1'
  pod 'SwiftOTP', '2.0.1' # last version before support limited to 10.15
  pod 'CryptoSwift', '1.4.0'
  pod 'PromiseKit', '6.13'
  pod 'lottie-ios', '3.2.1'
  pod 'SVGKit', :git => '[email protected]:SVGKit/SVGKit.git', :branch => '3.x'
  
end

A bit more detail why adding paths outside the bundle is not a good idea (macOS target, not iOS)

if dynamic library validation is disabled; then macOS will do a extensive check for any libraries outside the bundle. In my case, dynalic lv is disabled because I need to load external plugins.

Apple DTS have written about this in depth, here: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/706414

In short though, if you do a otool -l | grep -B 1 -A 2 LC_RPATH

and you see anything that is an external reference outside the bundle, the app will not load (it'll be prevented by gatekeeper)

here's an example from a brand new swift project with one pod (as framework) addded:

otool -l /Users/neil/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/TestApp-auhylmrqosjninaevcafotrjwalh/Build/Products/Debug/TestApp.app/Contents/MacOS/TestApp | grep -A 2 -B 1 RPATH
...
...
Load command 38
          cmd LC_RPATH
      cmdsize 120
         path /Applications/Xcode-beta.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/lib/swift/macosx (offset 12)

Which will cause the resulting app to fail to load/run

Here's my Podfile, for reference (basically you just need at least one framework)

target 'TestApp' do
  use_frameworks!
  project "TestApp/TestApp.xcodeproj"
  pod "Alamofire"
end

Update:
I've since found that as of 12.5, an app with /Applications/Xcode-beta.app/Contents/Developer/... in its path will run. I asked Apple about this, and was advised it's a bug. So I imagine when Apple fixes it, more apps will fail for real.

In my specific case, I had another bug in my build causing LC_RPATH's into /User. However; above comment is still technically correct (thus a problem) even though right now a signed, notarized binary will actually work.

Apple recommend that your binary should have zero paths pointing outside of itself.

Recently I encountered exactly the same issue after upgrading CocoaPods to 1.11.3. I've made a PR to address this issue and the following snippet in Podfile would be a temporary fix:

work_dir = Dir.pwd
installer.aggregate_targets.each do |target|
  if target.name == 'Pods-AppTarget'
    target.user_build_configurations.each do |key, name|
      if key == "Debug" || key == "Release"
        xcconfig_filename = "#{work_dir}/Pods/Target Support Files/#{target}/#{target}.#{name}.xcconfig"
        xcconfig = File.read(xcconfig_filename)
        xcconfig = xcconfig.gsub(/(LD_RUNPATH_SEARCH_PATHS = .*?)"\${DT_TOOLCHAIN_DIR}\/usr\/lib\/swift\/\${PLATFORM_NAME}"(.*)/, "\\1\\2")
        File.open(xcconfig_filename, "w") { |file| file << xcconfig }
      end
    end
  end
end