When a commit to revision control requires a developer to change their own config

Question

What\'s the best method to notify other developers when a change committed into revision control requires some specific additional action by the developer getting the update

Answer 1

For files where each developer needs to make local changes (like database connection strings, etc.) I like to keep a template as a tracked file, something like localconfig.template. In your build/launch scripts you could have logic like this:

if not exists localconfig then
  copy localconfig.template to localconfig
else
  if localconfig.template is newer than localconfig
    print a big ugly warning about maybe needing to update