Quoting jp.stacey@torchbox.com:
In this situation, although each *site* has a settings.php, each developer is checking out the same settings.php from the repository per site. They don't want to be editing settings.php in case it gets folded back into the repository, deployed to live and breaks it. This means that, if two developers are working on the same development server rather than on their desktops, then even if they work on different physical files on the filesystem, subversion still gives them identical settings.php, and without extra effort they will end up sharing a database.
Yes. The install process now makes the settings.php file read only. This is the reason. Make sure this files mod settings is 444 for extra good measure that svn will not overwrite it on update.
Having some code that would switch database based on HTTP Host is ideal, really, as that's the main marker for Drupal to tell it which site it has to pretend to be ;) This switching seems perfectly natural, coming from an environment where local/live config switching is expected, and devel/test/prod config switching is generally desirable.
I hope and have assumed you're aware of the multi-sites features for version 5? sites/all/modules sites/all/themes URL http://www.example.com/dev/user1 sites/www.example.com.dev.user1/settings.php sites/www.example.com.dev.user1/modules sites/www.example.com.dev.user1/themes URL http://www.example.com/dev/user2 sites/www.example.com.dev.user2/settings.php sites/www.example.com.dev.user2/modules sites/www.example.com.dev.user2/themes URL http://www.example.com/test sites/www.example.com.test/settings.php sites/www.example.com.test/modules sites/www.example.com.test/themes URL http://www.example.com sites/www.example.com/settings.php sites/www.example.com/modules sites/www.example.com/themes It is recommended that modules and themes that affect all sites be placed in sites/all/modules and sites/all/themes. Then dev user 1 can place the modules she is working on in her local site while dev user 2 can place the themes he is working on in his local site. When test is ready, the modules and themes are placed in the test local site. Now to deploy I will bet you can guess what is next. Earnie