Yeah, your post is over two years old, but through the magic of SuperSearch I just stumbled across it. Some of what you describe above I wrote as Config::Simple::Inherit, which then got subsumed in Config::Simple::Entended (which I still maintain, I guess, until the author of Config::Simple wants to incorporate the new methods I use regularly in his module).

Anyway, it handles the inheritance of configurations for you. And Extended also offers a method which will parse an incoming url to determine which configuration you want to use so a single installation of the code base can host multiple instances of an application simply by reading different configuration files. Long range I will eventually also add support for heredoc to ::Extended, as well, so it can be used to feed copy into a webform.

Check it out if you think this might be useful. Its been uploaded to CPAN.

-- Hugh