Opinions on "conditional" Spring files

[Cantor, Scott]

On 12/31/17, 8:57 AM, "dev on behalf of Rod Widdowson" <dev-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of rdw at steadingsoftware.com> wrote:

> Bearing in mind always that I am not a deployer, or at best an occasional one, I think I actually prefer having 
> (functionally) empty placeholder files in the deployer's config space.  It sort of leads one towards doing things the right
> way without having to find out in the documentation how to do it.  At the same time, with less developer presence in
> the users' list people might waste someones time until they hit on the/a right way to do something.

I tend to agree, that's why I was hesitant to just start replacing empty files all over the place. But I do think there's a reasonable boundary between "might be used" and "almost never relevant to 99% of deployers", so judiciously used I think we can get rid of a few of them at least.

Unfortunately one of the places I'd really like to add this is inside the flow bean files, but that Spring context doesn't have the ability to handle this.

> Finally if we went this way we'd need to think through the installer (strictly speaking the ant script) implications
> carefully.  It won't be rocket science but it will need some test and thought.  And I hate having to crack that file open....

The intention would be that any file that's already there never gets touched, which I think is already true.

-- Scott