This has been brought up on the dev@openide mailing list many times, most recently by several people in the "Please give
feedback on your NB platform experiences" thread.

It is often desirable to create multiple versions of a given application with varying features, achieved by the
inclusion of different sets of modules.  For example, my "enterprise" suite creates a version containing modules A, B, C
and D while the "lite" suite creates a version with only A and D.  In other cases, you might have totally separate
applications which have some number of modules in common.  

The NetBeans 5.0+ harness does not directly support this, as the module must be owned by exactly one suite via the
nbproject/suite.properties file.  Developers have come up with various workarounds, but since this is a somewhat common
need, it should be handled in the default harness.

Suite chaining is one workaround.  I have been using another, which is to make all my modules refer to a static suite
name.  All my modules point to a suite named "suite" and I check a suite out from CVS like "cvs co -d suite
myactualsuitename".  

IIRC, the pre-5.0 cluster build harness did not require modules to link to the suite (or whatever the equivalent of a
suite was called).