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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, this is a problem they (said) they addressed in latest Xcode. We'll see how that turns out in practice I guess.

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I have a large complex project in XCode. (It's this: http://macdaddy.io/mac-backup-software)

It looks simple but it's actually about 6 different programs all stuck together.

Codesigning breaks on it periodically, and it takes days to fix.

XCode 8 has just broken this worse than any other XCode version in history. It seems to have done so by trying to automate all its requirements. So now it outputs broken bundles when I compile it. This has taken me all of today, and I'll be surprised if I have it working within the next 6 hours of work.

This is a fairly typical experience of using XCode for me. Many times getting codesigning working correctly and getting it working within the mac app store parameters takes more time than writing the code.

In short: Using XCode is harder than programming.

You can never, ever, just upgrade Xcode (or anything important, really) on a production Mac. Xcode, especially, needs to be installed on a sandbox machine first where it can destroy anything it wants. It's an effort, but still better than having production explode in your face.

That's probably a good approach. Still, when my certificates expire (which makes the provisioning profiles invalid), that alone will take hours or days to fix. So even if it's left in a completely untouched environment certificates expire after a year or two and I cannot recompile the project without a lot of work.

Maybe you need to refactor your application instead, to make it more like how xcode expects applications to be structured?

It's all using Apple endorsed formats. It's just using an awful lot of them. But it's all exactly how it's supposed to be. But because it's using a daemon, a Finder extension, command line interface apps, etc, they all have their own provisioning profiles and they all have to be codesigned in their own ways. Which is what makes it tricky.

Please report this issue at http://bugreport.apple.com along with sysdiagnose, we'd love to take a look. Please include project as well if possible.

They’ve been fixing this issue with every release of Xcode and it’s still broken. At some point we must realize that code-signing is something that the Xcode team will never be able to get working reliably due to incompetence or apathy (or both).

With automatic provisioning/specific profile mode, they definitely removed a lot of the sharp edges when it comes to provisioning, but they also removed all of the flexibility. It definitely feels like Xcode on training wheels with no option to remove them unless you rely on a now deprecated feature set.

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