cordova-node-xcode VS xcodeproj

We are producing a white-label mobile app which also runs on Apple devices. It's part of our build chain to modify bespoken Xcode project files. Of great help is this node library which allows automating our build process which includes modifications to the Xcode project file: https://github.com/apache/cordova-node-xcode

Since the Xcode config is just a legacy plist file Xcode will recognize it if it is converted to json. So we just leave it as json right? Well I wish it was that easy but there is also Cordova and that has it’s own Xcode config parser that is actually quite bad cordova-node-xcode. It must have the legacy plist format and to make matters even worth it also needs the comments preserved.

Absolutely. I spent forever reverse engineering the format to write a Python parser (https://github.com/microsoft/xcodeproj). It covers the projects I need it to (one in particular is very complex, probably in the top 100 most complex ones out there - I'm sure you can figure out which from my profile). However, there are plenty of areas I had to guess. And this is just for reading, no writing support has been added at this point.