Hello, I would like to ask you for your opinion on the best practices of managing big numbers of complex (for example xml, .properties, custom formats etc) configuration files as nowadays every more complex project consist of way to many to count.
How not to get lost in such a mess? How to reuse those in best ways? Any good tool that can help (maybe some Eclipse based)?
I'm not sure if this would be applicable to your situation, but I'd try and store them all in a database in a normalised fashion. maybe you need a could write some import tools that grabs the info from the files and adds them to the db.
Obviously, the most fundamental thing to do is to put those configuration files into source control, as they really are a kind of source code.
But the real challenge with configuration management is deciding how many files to have and what to put where so that you can reuse common configurations. Those are design decisions and very project- and environment-specific, and no tool can make them for you.
A common approach is to have a master config file that contains default values, and environment-specific files that contain only those config values that are different for their environment, and which overwrite the defaults. This happens as part of an automated build process (which you really, really should have).