Rollout of new FMS updates and releases ...

We have a small problem in our organization, where we tend to have x number of FMS servers at a time... some for development, some production.

When we have a new update of FMS, there are several steps we must take to update each instance.  Even worse for a new release of FMS, because we must review the configuration files for newly introduced variables.

Thus far, for updates, I simply install it in a dummy location, tar it up and then distribute it that way (backing up the older instance).  The conf/ directory is stored in SVN.

I noticed there are a couple of command tools in the distribution that populate the configuration *.ini files.  They aren't intelligent (ie: they'll just keep appending). 

But my primary question is if there is some other clever way to update these instances and avoid the inevitable mistake or two that humans make (like permissions on /var/log/fms, etc).   I thought about making an RPM for internal use, using some scripting to do substitution on variables in configuration files, but that may be overkill.

Constructive input, ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks.