Realizing this JIRA has a number of watches/votes, I wanted to provide an update on the long-term plan for XML-based configuration.

With Hibernate HBM-based mappings being a deprecated technology to be replaced by JPA's orm.xml, the plan will be to consider adding some form of extensions which will allow users to use the JPA orm.xml process to define Envers mappings rather than using HBM-based mappings. This isn't within the scope of ORM 5 and most likely not part of ORM 6, at the very least not in any of the earlier 6.x releases.

I'll be looking to add this to the roadmap, most likely as part of ORM 7.