title: Use maven profiles for developer sandbox settings?
body: <p>I've seen several projects where I work that use profiles.xml and various {username}.properties in the project for developer sandbox settings like the deployment directory for the deploy script, the ports to run on, which database and web service to use, etc. Now that Maven 3 has removed support for profiles.xml, it's caused me to question this practice altogether. So I have a few questions:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Is there a better mechanism rather than profiles to accomplish this?</li>
  <li>If not, do you feel {username}.properties belong in the scm? Sometimes (for example) when a service URL changes, we forget to update all the developers' properties.</li>
  <li>If it's not a bad idea to have these properties files in the scm, should there be some kind of profile inheritance for settings common between developer sandboxes? How could that be done?</li>
  <li>As a side note, do you know why Apache removed support for profiles.xml in Maven 3?</li>
  </ol>