I have an image that has 3 profiles:

oem oem-head and vmx-head

oem builds an oem iso on top of our stable packages (set of repos A)
oem-head builds an oem iso on top of our unstable packages (set of repos B)
vmx-head builds an vmware image on top of our unstable packages (set of repos B)

I have 

<profiles>
  <profile name="oem" description="Stable product"/>
  <profile name="oem-head" description="In development packages"/>
  <profile name="vmx-head" description="In development packages"/>
</profiles>

And then a preferences section:

<preferences profiles="oem,oem-head">
....
and
<preferences profiles="vmx-head">

Then for repositories:

<repository profiles="oem" type="rpm-md" priority="1">
...
<repository profiles="oem-head,vmx-head" type="rpm-md" priority="1">
..

Also some packages are profiled:

<packages profiles="oem" type="image">
..
<packages profiles="oem-head,vmx-head" type="image">

As you see, some stuff is shared between the oem* and others between the *head images.

When trying to build:

Activating device mapper...
..done
running kiwi --prepare for oem...
Feb-03 12:50:48 <1> : Setting log file to: terminal
Feb-03 12:50:48 <1> : Reading image description [Prepare]...
Feb-03 12:50:48 <2> : Description provides no MD5 hash, check   skipped
Feb-03 12:50:48 <1> : EXEC [uname -m]
Feb-03 12:50:48 <3> : Only one <version> definition expected, found 2   failed
Feb-03 12:50:48 <3> : KIWI exited with error(s)   done

Before I was hit by bug 668585, However I think the way the build service builds with profiles should be different. The whole idea is to maintain one source and get various images. Otherwise we need to manually copy the root.tar.bz2 and merge the XML files.

You should either build the same image 3 times (like what happens with product:XXXXXX) which generates packages from it, or to allow symlinking to a disabled package with the sources, and specify the profile in the link.