Just a quick reminder to everyone publishing Delphi projects with source:

Please don’t publish your .dproj & .groupproj, only publish the .dpr & .dpk

The reason? Those files include machine specific settings, such as paths, DCU/DCP/BPL/EXE output directories, along with your favorite debug & release options, which are likely different from that of your fellow developer.

It’s possible to have them manually cleaned up, but that’s tedious and error-prone short of checking their xml content manually.

Pretty much every single project with a .dproj out there has issues: that’s from major open-source projects to Embarcadero’s own samples. None of them (of you) got all of them cleaned up right.

But even getting the published .dproj right doesn’t matter: .dproj is where compile options are stored, options you’re just bound to change and adjust. When those .dproj are in a project you synchronize with via version control (SVN, GIT, etc.), your locally modified .dproj will likely conflict next time you synchronize, sometimes in unintended and not immediately obvious ways.

Hopefully in a future version, Embarcadero will split the .dproj, so that machine-specific settings are in a distinct file from the non-machine specific settings, which would essentially be per-project relative paths to the source files.

Ad interim, .dproj are just a kludge by design.