"Parse issue: Unknown type name" error after upgrading XCode

Question

After I upgraded my Mac OS X to Mountain Lion (all the way from Snow Leopard) and XCode 5 (all the way from XCode 3.2) I can no longer build a C++ project that I used to build in XCode successfully. I get loads of errors now all saying "Parse issue: Unknown type name *" for different objects. I tried an older version of XCode (4.6) and set the SDK to Mac OS X 10.7. This problem was solved but not using the latest version of XCode caused other problems.

To be specific, the errors (at least the first ones) seem to be related to Carbon graphic library. I don't know if that matters. I know that Carbon is somehow outdated but an official release of the application I'm extending runs on Mac OS 10.8 so I wonder why I can't build the code on 10.8.

What can be the cause of this error? The code is big and is not written by me so changing it is not an option. I really need to build it on XCode 5 or else I should downgrade my OS!

Answer 1

Several things that have been long deprecated in Carbon were finally removed in the Mac OS X 10.7 SDK.

You will need the Mac OS X 10.6 SDK to build your project. Apple stopped automatically including older SDKs with newer versions of Xcode but you can download older Xcode versions (from Apple's Developer site) and one of them...maybe Xcode 4.3 or so...will have the 10.6 SDK.

In order to use an older SDK with a newer Xcode, you must install it manually. The correct location is:

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/

Also note, any upgrade to Xcode (such as an update downloaded from the App Store) will obliterate your manually-installed SDKs. I recommend archiving the ones you need somewhere else so you can replace them as needed.