Other anticipated changes for 0.8.5, Part 2

[Chip Morningstar]

MarkM asks:
>Chip (or anyone who remembers), why did we create our own properties mechanism 
>in Original-E?  E inherited it, and we're using it as above, but I'd like to 
>retire it and use the Java System.getProperty() property mechanism instead 
>if it does what we need.  Does it?

My memories of this are a little dim (and I don't particularly feel up to a
session of source code archaeology at the moment :-), but as best I can recall,
there were two reasons. The first was to let configuration parameters be placed
somewhere that mere mortals could fiddle with them (my memory is that feeding
new properties into the Java property mechanism at one point required you to
edit a system file, the idea (apparently) being that properties were supposed
to be reasonably static and invariant descriptors of the runtime environment
rather than a means for individual users to customize that environment; this
may have changed). The second reason was to enable properties to be set on the
command line, which the normal Java invocation mechanism provided no support
for. The Original-E (and by extension elib) property mechanism was an extension
to the Java property mechanism, not a replacement -- all the original Java
properties were also passed through to it. It may well be the case that the
motivation for all this is weaker now.