Cannot build manual ref count CocoaPod - ios

Question

I have an iOS CocoaPod that is a couple of years old as a pod, and several years older than that as a reusable component. Previously built with older versions of Xcode. It was developed with and remains "manual reference counting". I am now trying to import it into a "new" project (actually reconstructed from an old project and also manual reference counting), but I cannot get it to build.
As I said, the enclosing project is manual reference counting and compiles OK that way with no pods installed. "Automatic Reference Counting" is set to "No" in "Build Settings".
However, even though the exact same Build Settings "No" value is present in the pods project, it always generates a compile script with -fobjc-arc, and calls to retain and release are flagged as errors. (Eg, error: 'release' is unavailable: not available in automatic reference counting mode.)
The version of Xcode is 6.0.1.
The version of pod is 0.34.4 (installed fresh yesterday).
The podspec for the pod in question:
Pod::Spec.new do |s|
s.name = "libXXX"
s.version = "1.0"
s.summary = "Exchange library for XYZ."
s.description = "Static library pod for the XXX framework."
s.homepage = "http://example.com"
s.license = { :type => 'MIT', :text => 'Copyright 2012 XYZ' }
s.author = { "Bill Nye" => "bnye#example.com" }
s.source = { :git => 'https://code.example.com/ios/XXX.git', :tag => '1.0' }
s.platform = :ios
s.source_files = 'StaticLib/Headers/*.h'
s.preserve_paths = 'StaticLib/libXXX.a'
s.library = 'XChangeA'
s.xcconfig = { 'LIBRARY_SEARCH_PATHS' => '$(PODS_ROOT)/libXXX/StaticLib' }
s.dependency 'libSignatureToken'
end
I tried adding s.requires_arc = false to the pod spec (and performing pod update), but nothing changed. I also tried s.compiler_flags = '-fno-objc-arc', with no success.
So, how do I convince Xcode to compile the pod with manual reference counting?
Resolved
Apparently "unrelated" problems during pod update caused it to fail silently without configuring the compile mode info. Running pod update --verbose repeatedly helped smoke out the problems.

Answer 1

You need to use s.requires_arc = false
This is documented here. The default recently changed from false to true. Also this error should appear if you run pod spec lint.