From an administrative perspective, there is a significant cost to allowing an application to change configuration files.  For very large deployments, what I'd ideally want is to deploy identical configuration files everywhere ( ideally via a packaging system that allowed me to handle dependency checks and that supports signatures and hashsum verification checks ).  This sort of thing allows me to be dead sure that what we are running in production is what we tested and verified and it also lets me be dead sure that no eager beaver has "helped out" by reconfiguring something in production to "solve" a problem.   But if the config files *must* be mutable, then I'm kind of stuck.   So what I'd really like to do is completely turn off anything that munges domain.xml or host.xml.  <deployments> seems to be a sticking point.  Is there a way around this?