Vincent MATHIEU helpfully brought it to my attention that the 2.6.1 implementation of 'delpoyPortletApp' was putting portlet files in the wrong place if the 'deploy.home' property in build.properties was defined using a relative path.

The issue stemmed from the fact the <java> task defined within 'deployPortletApp' was invoking Java from the webpages/ directory. In this circumstance, a relative 'deploy.home' would be evaluated from the webpages/ directory, *not* from the root of the portal source tree (as expected).

Now then, running 'deployPortletApp' from webpages/ was done for a reason: namely, the xml-catalog.xml file would have the same relative path from the command line as it would from within the running webapp. I set it up this way because I hoped, some day soon, to run the portlet deployer from within a running instance of uPortal as well as from the command line.