why should .pbxproj file be treated as binary in version control systems?

Question

In few places its been mentioned that .pbxproj file should be committed/imported as binary in cvs or git. it looks like script file in text format. what are reasons behind this suggestion that it should be treated as binary?

Answer 1

As mentioned here, pbxproj is not really mergeable, being a complex property list managed as JSON.

The usual setting is in a .gitattributes:

*.pbxproj -crlf -diff -merge

As explained here:

This prevents Git from trying to fix newlines, show it in diffs, and excludes it from merges.

The other approach is:

*.pbxproj binary merge=union

As documented here, this didn't work well.

The problem was that braces would become out of place on a regular basis, which made the files unreadable. It is true that tho does work most of the time - but fails maybe 1 out of 4 times.