On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 10:53 PM, Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
<mail@webthatworks.it> wrote:

> There is not a compact knowledge base of several techniques that may
> make more profitable for people that already maintain drupal sites
> to contribute to core and contrib. I think that most developers are
> still applying common wisdom and their own hand made recipes.
>

Actually, there is....
http://drupal.org/patch/review

and in more general there is the entire contributors guide handbook about this.

>
> If tests are already automatically made on submitted patches,
> preparing a testing environment isn't so critical for a patch
> reviewer, but it could come handy for a developer.
>

One of the major reasons for push to get unit tests written is so that
this basic type of review can be automated within the issue queue. You
can already load these tests yourself and test them automatically.

> The material about how to put up a dev/review environment is sparse.

again not correct..... Setting up a test environment to review
patches: http://drupal.org/node/28245

However, I think that most of this problem is not really a lack of
documentation for doing these reviews. Anyone that is sufficiently
interested can find this stuff out or ask someone and learn very
easily. I think more of this issue is community and infrastructure
based.

-Ryan