[flac-dev] What is in directory flac.pbproj?

[Brian Willoughby]

On Apr 30, 2013, at 13:45, Marcus Johnson wrote:
> I'd love to fix the .Xcodeproj (which is what they're called now)  
> but I don't have a clue how to, if I were to figure it out would  
> you guys accept it, or is it not worth my time?

Thanks for the offer, but I don't think it's worth the time. Here is  
my reasoning:

1) Historically, flac has been built from the command line on OSX,  
just like every other Unix operating system. In that respect,  
the .pbproj and .xcodeproj files are not really necessary. In fact,  
that's probably why they became outdated and broken, since nobody  
really needed them. I have been working with flac for a long time,  
and I've never seen those files work. When I built the last flac  
release for OSX distribution, I did not use them, preferring to use  
make.

2) If anyone is going to fix the .pbproj or .xcodeproj files, I  
highly recommend that it be done with Xcode itself. Attempting to  
manually edit these files is pointless. You need to verify them with  
Xcode anyway, so you might as well use Xcode to fix them. Frankly,  
recreating them makes more sense than fixing the existing files,  
although you might look in the existing files to make sure you don't  
leave anything out.

3) In my opinion, it is better to create the project files with the  
oldest version of Xcode that is up to the task and supported. The  
reason is that newer versions of Xcode can open old project files,  
converting them if necessary. Unfortunately, the reverse is not true,  
so using Xcode 4 to fix these files would needlessly exclude older  
versions. The only reason to orphan developers this way is when the  
sources make use of new OSX features that are not available on older  
releases, but flac doesn't depend on any OS features that are  
exclusive to OSX, and certainly not on any OSX features that are only  
in newer releases.

4) That said, Project Builder (.pbproj) is simply too old to be of  
use to anyone, so far as I know. Apple possibly still supports OSX  
10.4 Tiger, but anything older than that is in the land of "fend for  
yourself" (where command line make is going to work fine anyway). I  
believe it is true that Project Builder was last seen on OSX 10.3  
Panther, so I don't have a problem with dropping it. I do maintain  
several Macs running various different OSX releases, and I regularly  
build things under Tiger to ensure that the largest number of people  
can run the binary, but even as old as these machines are it's still  
Xcode, not Project Builder.

I'd like to take a stab at creating a set of .xcodeproj files that  
work with Xcode 2.5 and newer, but maybe someone will beat me to it.

I fully support Erik's request to simply delete the .pbproj directory  
and its contents.

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting

p.s. Unfortunately, I do not know who originally created  
those .pbproj files, why they did it, or whether they ever worked.  
You might even find archived list messages where I asked about them.