The ever-increasing complexity and diversity of consumer products drives the creation of product families (products with many commonalties and few differences) and product populations (products with many commonalties but also with many differences). For the latter, we use an approach based on composition of software components, organized in packages. This influences our configuration management approach. We use traditional CM systems for version management and temporary variation, but we rely on our component technology for permanent variation. We also handle build support and distributed development in ways different from the rest of the CM community.