Yeah, I got the intention and it really is a trade off. This is the cleanest way to get the permissions to work, but even that is for Linux deployment. This goes back to the question of how much cross deployment work should be done. With local development you should be able to just leave the projects directory there as we switch between branches, but this provides an easy way to do a fresh deployment on a Linux system.

If we're really opposed to this we could have the Makefile create a dummy file in projects/ but I don't quite like that approach.