Locally manage user/branch setting files without pushing them remotely

Hi,

I had a situation I don't know how to manage with Git.

The project has a lot of setting that are really binded to the user and should not go pushed in a remote repository (example: database connections parameters / filesystem paths) We have a .template file for those settings but the actual settings are really binded to the user environment. I added those files to the .gitignore but now I can't keep an history of them and I can't use different version of them in different branches.

I tell you what's the real situation but I will simplify things a little, suppose I only have two branches: master and experiments.

I've a java application and some ANT script to automatizations like compiling, packaging and deploying stuffs.

On my system I had two application servers and two databases one for "master" and the other for "experiment". There is a property files with the path of the two application servers and the parameters to connect at the DB.

The ant script automatically deploy on the right application server and automatically set the properties to connect at the right database.

This allow me to clean my experimantal database everytimes I need to and start over by a clean situation and keep the "master" one populated with all the data so I can do stress test/update procedures test and so on...

At the moment I manually modify that property files when I checkout one of the two branches and I need to deploy it to test or whatever.

Is there a way with Git to automatically switch that file when i switch through branches? It would be really perfect if I could also keep version of that file so that when I checkout an old commit I had the options I was using when I was testing that commit.

Ideally that means that should be some files that are kept within each commit but they are not pushed to a remote repository. (Even if i'm talking about pushing I'm using git-svn because my company still use SVN as versioning system so I don't push but i do git svn dcommit when committing on a remote repository)

How do you manage situation like this?

thanks, Daniele