Is there any option at all to specify which deploy.xml file to use? Tracking changes between branches and multiple devs would be easier if one could...

not sure I understand the question. doesn't each branch have its own deploy.xml? that's the correct one for that branch?

Yes, however, it's been requested that the master branch deploy file shouldn't change 😕

... ok so don't merge deploy.xml into master, tell your devs to exclude it from their pull requests, and have approvers double-check and reject

I forgot about excluding it from the PR, that'll work

idk if there's a way to protect? or lock? certain files in git? i know you can git ignore, seems like locking should be a thing maybe? i guess on the SDF side, I assume there's somewhere internally that tells the code to parse deploy.xml... you could potentially find that code and setup some kind of environment based override maybe? it seems feasible but I'd be reluctant to mess with the internals personally

You can use

suitecloud.config.js

to configure the default root directory per project and per operation (e.g.

project:validate

and

project:deploy

can run from different directories by default).

deploy.xml

could be different under your various project roots. It's maybe not what you want in this case because you'd have to figure out how to organize all the source and Object files accordingly, but it is possible.

Thanks, I'll play around with that as well. I've mainly been a one man show for years so my git requirements have been simple, so this is all new to me