[flymine-dev] home directory property files and branching, proposal

[Thomas Riley]

We need to come up with a nice solution for the case where someone  
has several flymine/t1dmine/etc releases (branches) checked out and  
they are all trying to use the same properties files from the user's  
home directory. I think we should rearrange things a bit and support  
different sets of properties files for different branches under the  
same user account. Maybe home directories should look like this:


~/
   .flymine/
     1.0/
       build.properties.flymine
       flymine.properties
     2.0/
       build.properties.flymine
       flymine.properties
     2.1/
       build.properties.flymine
       flymine.properties
     3.0/      <--- used by checkouts of branches
       build.properties.flymine
       flymine.properties
     dev/     <--- used by a checkout of the trunk
       build.properties.flymine
       flymine.properties
   .testmodel-webapp/
     dev/
       build.properties.testmodel-webapp
       testmodel-webapp.properties
   .t1dmine/
       ... etc



This would be combined with a change to the branching process. After  
branching, the branch would be immediately modified so that checkouts  
read properties from the correct subdirectory (e.g. '3.0' rather than  
'dev') when building/releasing.
We should also have a way to override the directory used on the  
command line when building. E.g.:

and build-production-webapp release-webapp -Dhome.properties.dir=~/ 
flymine/dev2

What do you think?

Tom