Colin Sampaleanu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 21/09/2003 05:41:06 AM:
> I wanted to get the rationale as to why build.properties from
> ${user.home} is more dominant than build.properties and
> project.properties from the project dir.
These are the users preferences, regardless of any project properties, or
build properties for a project.
They win, regardless.
> This has always seemed ass-backwards to me, and is in fact backwards to
> the order in which a number of ant projects I've seen (and mine) always
> did it. I always use ${build.properties} in user home as a source of
> default values, which can then be overriden on a project by project
> basis, as needed. If instead ${user.home} properties are the most
> dominant, those properties can not be used as a source of any defaults
> any longer, since they would wipe out any customizations in the project
> itself.
The idea is that the user knows what he wants, not the project builder.
> Now I take it that the Maven devs have always seen
> ${user.home}/build.properties not as a source of default values, but as
> a way to override project values, but in this respect I think that
> location is almost useless, since you would override all projects on the
> system, and in any case, there exists a mechanism at the project level
> to override properties, that is, build.properties at the project level
> being dominant over propect.properties.
Yep, and user's build.properties is intended to be global.
> I took a look through various open-source projects to see how their ant
> files did it. It's interesting that you find both orders in
Remember ant properties files are different. Ant properties, once set, are
immutable.
> jakarta-commons, not very-consistent. You also find both orders in other
> projects. Generally though, from what I could see, the majority of the
> projects (if they used a build.properties from ${user.home} at all, make
> the local project one the most dominant. I also found some projects
> where the file in ${user.home} was called something else, not
> build.properties. Again, generally those values are overriden by local
> values.
>
> Somewhat of an unfortunate mess... Is there any chance I can convince
> you guys to reverse the order?
I'm very much against this.
--
dIon Gillard, Multitask Consulting
Blog: http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/dion/
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