partial/gradual softupdate?

[Andreas Schuldei]

hi!

we want to start introducing partial nightly, automatic
softupdate runs (from cron) in order to deploy common changes
to all our hosts
like 
- the odd new munin server ip 
- some syslog server infrastructure changes
- new name servers (resolve.conf)

etc

so, these would be rather basic changes without a high risk to
disable machines.

of course we also need to do other changes which we would like to
do "manually", rather (but still with a softupdate of the
respective machine, like 
- deploying a new version of a service on just one of many
  servers of this type in order to see that it behaves well under
  load and wont give us surprises under load, on ALL the servers.
- reconfigureing the nameservers (and hope our service wont drop
  from the net all of a sudden).

these would be changes which we would NOT want to have in the
nightly run. upgrading all the remaining servers after a week would
be a change for the nightly run, on the other hand. 

how can i do this best, with the config space in svn and as
little special cases for servers as possible?

/andreas