Switching to a the same OS doesn't solve this particular
problem. Of course there are advantages if your development,
testing and production areas all use the same platform, but
that has little to do with configuration issues. Typical
configuration issues include (but are not limited to):
user names, passwords, database names, database servers,
file and directory names, hostnames, and port numbers.
One way of dealing with it is by using environment variables,
but that quickly becomes unwieldy. A typical way of dealing
with this is configuration files. Configuration files could
be stored at a fixed location (say /etc/opt/app/application-name/config); a location relative
the program, the working directory during startup, or the
home-directory of the user; given as a parameter of the
program; passed via an environment variable; or some combination of them.
Abigail
