What solutions are people using for managing and deploying different versions
of their configuration files?

A concrete example is the web.xml file in the jbosweb-tomcat.sar jboss-service.xml
file. For session clustering it requires you to change the jvmRoute attribute
for each instance in the cluster to point to the server defined in the workers.properties
file.

Any config file that references resources such as a datasource, file system, etc that may
change between development and production.

In the past I have made duplicate versions of my config files with the extension "-prod"
for all production conf, "-test" for development versions as well as a "-stage" for our staging/qa environment. I then have a process to link in the prod,test, or staging version where appropriate.

Other mechanisms I have tried are adding special tokens into my config files and replacing those tokens with the appropriate prod,stage, or test info at build time.

These methods have worked ok for me. I have never been entirely pleased with them. The symlink solution does not work for windows. Not to mention the unix paths vs windows (C:/) paths issues.

Any ideas, or suggestion on what has worked for you in the past would be much
appreciated.

Thanks,

-Joe