This Bugzilla instance is a read-only archive of historic NetBeans bug reports. To report a bug in NetBeans please follow the project's instructions for reporting issues.
If the nbproject/project.properties file in my module suite has trailing spaces on lines that start with "project.", then NB does not see the corresponding modules as being a part of the suite. This causes problems with respect to adding module dependencies, since the "hidden" modules are not considered a part of the suite. I don't know how the spaces got into the file in the first place, probably someone was editing the file by hand. Nonetheless, this is bad behavior and NB should be able to deal with the whitespace. This problem appears in 5.0, 5.0 u1, and 5.5 beta, on Solaris 10 x86, but not on Windows XP. Possibly happens on other Unix-like systems.
Trailing spaces are part of the value, according to the java.util.Properties specification. If you edit properties files as text you must take care not to insert superfluous trailing spaces, lest you change the meaning of the Map<String,String>. There are modules available on the NB update centers which highlight trailing spaces for you which might be useful. Probably the text/x-properties editor ought to display such trailing spaces in a special color.
Created attachment 31326 [details] My Emacs major mode for *.properties which marks trailing spaces in pink
Note: similar issues exist for Java manifest files, and of course the notorious TAB-in-Makefile problem.