How to zip an archive while keeping some symlinks but not others? (OS X)

Question

I'm using the zip command line tool on OS X to compress an Xcode project folder.

Included in that folder is a .framework for OS X which includes symlinks like xx.framework/Versions/Current which points to xx.framework/Versions/A. When I zip the project, then unzip it, both Versions/A and Versions/Current contain the same set of files - basically they are contained twice in the archive - I need to avoid that.

However I also have symlinks in the project folder pointing to resource files that need to be copied in the zip archive. So I can't just use the global zip flags to store the symlinks rather than the files/dirs pointed to.

How can I create a single ZIP file where only certain symlinks are stored while others will store the content they point to?

Is that even possible with zip? Is there another zip-compatible tool I could use? Could I run the zip command multiple times, excluding/including certain files while storing the files to the same archive to achieve what I want?

PS: I can not have a zip inside the zip. Once unzipped, the project must be usable and not require unzipping a contained zip.

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Things I've tried:

zip -rq4y $ZIPFILE $TARGETFOLDER/xx.framework
zip -rq4u $ZIPFILE $TARGETFOLDER

The idea was to zip the .framework first, preserving the symlinks. Then update the archive to add the rest of the files, including any files/folders pointed to by symlinks not already in the archive (or so I hoped). Result: corrupt archive (Error 20 - Not a directory).

I also tried the opposite, excluding the framework on the first pass and then updating the archive with the framework:

zip -rq4 $ZIPFILE $TARGETFOLDER -x xx.framework
zip -rq4uy $ZIPFILE $TARGETFOLDER

Result: corrupt archive (Error 21 - Is a directory).

Answer 1

Gotcha!

One issue was that I used the wrong exclusion format, with the leading and trailing asterisk this solution works:

zip -rq4 $ZIPFILE $TARGETFOLDER -x *xx.framework*
zip -rq4uy $ZIPFILE $TARGETFOLDER -i *xx.framework*

So it first zips the folder excluding the framework, copying all symlinked files/folders into the archive.

The second line updates the archive with the y flag (store symlinks rather than files/folders pointed to). I explicitly only include the framework folder, this may not be necessary but I think it's cleaner and possibly faster.