Soft links and xcode projects
In other unix environments using soft links ("ln -s") is a handy way of "abstracting away" at the file system level what a file or directory actually contains, so that its contents can be easily changed without having to modify the original file or directory. In other words, if I have eg. three versions of the same file, and several projects share the usage of one of those files, I can easily change which version of the file those projects will use by simply making a softlink that points to the file I want, and make those projects depend on that softlink (they see it as a regular file). If I later want to change the file in question, I only need to change the softlink to point to another version of the file.
This is especially useful when dealing with a third-party library that gets regular updates. I can install the third-party library somewhere, with the version number of the library in the directory name, and have a more generic directory name as a softlink (as a concrete example, I could have a softlink named "cocos2d" pointing to a directory named "cocos2d-iphone-0.99.5"). If I update the library, I can install it in a new directory (eg. "cocos2d-iphone-1.0.1") and simply change the softlink to point to the new directory, and then recompile the projects that depend on it.
The problem is that Xcode doesn't like softlinks. I don't know if this is a feature of MacOS X in general, or a quirk in Xcode in particular. The problem is that Xcode doesn't want any softlinks in any of its paths, and instead always resolves where the softlink is really pointing to. Thus if I add, for example, the file "libraries/cocos2d/cocos2d-ios.xcodeproj" to the project, what ends up in the project is actually a reference to "libraries/cocos2d-iphone-0.99.5/cocos2d-ios.xcodeproj". Thus the whole softlink is circumvented, making it useless. If I update the library in question, I have to go through all the projects that use it and change the references to point to the new directory. This causes only needless extra work.
This resolving of softlinks only happens when adding a new file to the xcode project. Xcode doesn't seem to change them afterwards, if they already exist in the project. In the past I could get around this problem by editing the project file directly with a text editor and forcing the path to refer to the softlink. However, all the paths in xcode 4 projects seem to be obfuscated, making this impossible. Another possibility is to rename the directory in question with the name of the softlink, then add it to the project, then restore its original name and then add the soft link.
Is there any better way of doing this?
