A job I’m working on requires that the customer's massive old project be built with the 10.6 SDK. After spending a few minutes with Xcode 3, I was thinking of walking out the door. Actually, it was more than a few minutes – I watched Xcode 3 beachball for eight and a half minutes doing a Find in Project (not frameworks, just Project!). I remembered the bad old days.
But then I also remembered how, years ago, I’d copied the 10.5 SDK into Xcode 4, I think when I needed to build Bookdog. I remembered there were some issues, though, and eventually it was no longer possible. Realizing this was a much bigger stretch, in desperation I tried it again. I copied the 10.6 SDK from an Xcode 3 installation to Xcode 6.1 as described in this Stack Overflow article Amazingly, after 15 minutes of “indexing”, Xcode 6.1 Build Succeeded on this massive project, including CodeWarrior PowerPlant, using the 10.6 SDK, and the product launched and it works. Hey, I got 999+ warnings, but they were supposedly getting 700+ in Xcode 3.
Hmmm, there were probably fewer issues with this than with Bookdog and 10.5, because back then we were dealing with the PowerPC thing and different gcc versions.
Something I don’t say very often: Thank you, Apple, for not breaking this unsupported hack.
I might recommend still doing the final production build in Xcode 3 on the old Power Mac, but at least now I can develop.