Here is an example of how properties could be organized using apropos. Place note, this is an example, not recommendation or requirement. You could organize your properties in any way you like.
We start by creating the base package for sample project. Here we place kind of global properties which are modified very rear if ewer?
Next we create a sub-package for build properties and add a few more properties regarding JSP pre-compilation, ignoring compiler warnings, etc. This package can be used on pre-production machine for example. Notice how inherited properties are "faded" when "show parent properties" checkbox is selected.
But team 1 is working on cool new feature and on their test server they want to have JSP pages pre-comiled. They also would like to be notified on any build failure. So they make their own build package and overwrite "compileJsp", "mail.onBuildFailure" and "mail.onBuildFailure.recipients" properties.
Now, John is a member of team 1 and during development he compiles and runs this sample project on his own computer. John could keep it's properties in a local file but then he may not notice an important change and write code that works locally but fails to run on pre-production. Therefore John decides to add his own package of build properties and only overwrite what makes sense for his local builds.
Alice, another team 1 member, is also extending build properties. She knows compiler warnings exists for a reason, but they make too much noise so she decides to ignore them for some time. That's why she overwrites the "ignore.warnings" property with value of "true". Note how the property value is "highlighted" indicating that a parent property was overwritten but value didn't change.
In a very similar way team 2 and it members add their own build properties.
For database related properties we use the same structure. This allows team to switch to different database by simply overwriting the "db.host", "db.port" or "db.schema" property.
Finally we add file locations in a very similar way. The difference is that base package is overwritten with platform specific instead of team specific values. Note the comment saying that "log.error.dir" and "log.info.dir" are relative to "log.dir". This allows to simply overwrite "log.dir" (with "C:\path" for windows and "/var/log/path" for linux)
