[tycho-user] Conventions/procedures for using properties file resources

["David M. Karr" <davidmichaelkarr@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm familiar with how "typical" Maven applications process properties 
files using the maven-resources-plugin, and I've used Maven for many years.

In the Eclipse codebase I inherited, which uses Tycho, I'm going to have 
to define some properties that are used at runtime, the values of which 
will be stored in the POM for the plugin (of several in a multiproject 
build) that needs to access these properties.

As this is my first experience with Tycho and an Eclipse application 
build, and as I've found some aspects of the Tycho build process 
somewhat surprising, I'm wondering whether there are particular 
conventions I should follow for managing properties like this in this 
ecosystem.

For instance, I assume I would just store this properties file in 
"src/main/resources", use the maven-resources-plugin to filter property 
values, and load the file from the classpath.

I noticed that the original authors of this codebase didn't set up a 
"typical" Maven Java source code folder structure, they just created a 
source folder named "src", and both Java source files and properties 
files went into this tree.  That seems lazy to me, but perhaps some 
convention or aspect of Tycho and Eclipse makes that a reasonable thing 
to do?

In the case of this application, these properties files are all used as 
ResourceBundles, and from inspecting the code, it does appear there are 
conventions for managing these (extending "NLS", for instance).

For the case I'm looking at, the properties I want to manage don't 
represent localizable messages, so they don't need to be managed as 
ResourceBundles, although I can see it's tempting to use the existing 
practice for loading these, which would mean putting them in a resource 
bundle.

Ironically, the number of properties I'm talking about is very small, 
perhaps 2-3.