How do you manage common build components?

[David S.]

I'm starting to see a lot of churn in creating similar build specs for every project I have. There are two or three common build specs I use in most projects, and each of those has common pre-build and post-build VIs. For example, when making a <user.lib> component that will be distributed as a VI Package, I use a source distribution that moves pertinent files to the VIPB project folder and disables debugging and automatic error handling on each VI. It's the same source distribution in every project, except for the absolute path used for the destination.

I'm considering creating a template .lvproj file that contains the build items and cloning that for every new project. Other than the need to manually replicate bug fixes in the build items across all old projects, does anyone see problems with this approach? Do you have a better way of managing common build components on your development machines?