XCode 5 DP & LiveCode (Spoiler: beware!)

[append[x]]

Two days ago I made a brave attempt to checkout the XCode 5 Developer Preview. I have iOS 7beta on my iPad since it has been made available and I made good experiences with it - I was especially delighted to see that all my LiveCode Apps would run smoothly under iOS7.

Encouraged, I installed XCode 5 parallel to my other instances of XCode (4.6.3 being the one I typically use for deployment).

After the installation of XCode 5 I was not able to build standalones from LiveCode any more. The process failed on the codesigning ("codesigning failed with 1..."). The shown error is similar to the one you get when you have ambigious or expired certificates (http://ftp.runrev.com/forums/viewtopic. ... 37&p=66202). So I was first looking in this direction, getting rid of all expired and double certificates, messing with the keychain a lot. Then I re-created the provisioning profiles. I deleted XCode 5, I started XCode 4, refreshed the profiles automatically and manually. I tried with LiveCode 6. But the error would not go.

So I reset my computer to a time-machine backup from just before the installation of XCode 5 and everything is back to normal. Standalones can be built. I am not so experienced with the XCode environment, but my believe is, that there is an incompatibility of the commandline tools, especially /usr/bin/codesign, which is overwritten by XCode 5 when you choose - as I did - to install the commandline tools along with the SDK. Such incompatibilities in codesign have been reported before, especially on the migration from XCode 3 and XCode 4.

I might be wrong, but my advice is, to never install an XCode DP on a machine that you use for deployment. There is obviously no way to cleanly install two XCode SDKs in parallel, as the commandline tools will conflict. It is possible to skip the installation of commandline tools when a new XCode SDK is installed, but I would expect the SDK to not be able to work properly with outdated components in that case.

I hope, with this information, I can save someone else from the 12 hours trouble shooting I had to go through.

[endernafi]

So, to sum it up:
Never, ever upgrade xCode or OS X before LiveCode's official support!


Cheers,

~ Ender Nafi