suggestions for local configs?

Hi list, I'm wrestling with a question and figured that someone on the list may have some suggestions that have worked for them.

I have a piece of software that has default and local configuration files. The default files ship with the tarball. The local files are copied over from the default folder during installation and can be modified for a particular install.

I clone my source repo on my test and prod systems, but have gotten in the bad habit of versioning the local configuration files. My (albeit pathetic) excuse is that when I test the code I may accidentally dork with the local config files and need to revert back to the correct ones.

At the same time though, I do want to version said local configs in something so that if changes are made and they need to be backed out, it can be done and there is the commit log that keeps track of what changed.

So the question is

- Can anyone suggest good ways of setting up git to track both the code
and local configs without making a whole new repository (code repo and
code config repo)

If not, any other suggestions are welcome and I'll consider how best to make them work in my environment.

I've briefly skimmed through the pro git book online and considered sub modules and sub-tree merging, but the kicker is that I may need to push the whole kit-n-kaboodle master repo to remote git servers and those two approaches sound hairy.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks, Tim