This is why God gave us environment variables. The right way to do it is to write a wrapper (shell)script, that does two things: source to appropriate config file (which sets a bunch of environment variables), and then launch the appropriate programs that use the environment variables to determine which directories/files to use.

You'd have a config file for your development environment and one for your stable environment.

Been there, done that, didn't get the T-shirt.

Abigail