I've known quite a few people that have used CVS to manage their sites quite successfully. I know you mentioned that in your post, but I thought people might want a good place to start looking into it, if the whole rsync route doesn't seem like what they need:
http://www.durak.org/cvswebsites/howto-cvs/howto-cvs.html
It's a pretty good introduction to CVS, oriented towards web development.

Re: the use of ssh -- setting the 'RSYNC_RSH' environment variable to 'ssh' will make rsync always use ssh, w/o needing to specify on the command-line. I set this system-wide, as I can't think of a time when I'd ever want rsync over rsh (the default).

Adam: I think the reason you've never gotten /etc/hosts to work in os x is because the system only looks at that when booted in single user mode, I believe.

Not amazingly rsync or OS X related, but related to the problem you discuss:

http://www.wigwam-framework.org/

This is a framework for managing web sits / apps / services in an environment with development, test and production setups that are all different, and somewhat automating the process of working on projects and pushing/publishing from one set of servers to the next.

Just got a nice message from Bill Bumgarner about a blog entry of his on ssh -- which I realize I forgot to mention in conjunction with rsync. My rsync commandlines all use the "-e ssh" option. Naked FTP is terribly insecure.

Edited by author 03-04-2003 01:22 PM
I use Netinfo. Each .dev domain is an entry under "machines" with two properties set: "ip_address" (127.0.0.1) and "name" (foo.dev). Works great (assuming there's a corresponding VirtualHost entry in your Apache config of course).

What do you use to set up your .dev domains, NetInfo or hosts? For some reason I've never managed to get OS X reading the hosts file, and I don't really like mucking around in NetInfo just to set up my own .dev domains (though there aren't that many of them and I found a shell script that can do it for me.)