There are a lot of good tools for helping coders and reviewer. There should be a lot of experience in building up a dev environment *and* a patch review environment spread in the community but "hidden". If I had to put up a dev/review environment now I would: * install drupal HEAD * install coder devel modules(?) * fill drupal with some data using devel * backup * update from cvs * restore db connection setting * apply a patch - check if any schema change * test (benchmark?) * report * restore db Still this look very naive and I think there are a lot of tools that could help without getting into module frenziness and a lot of details that could streamline the process or setup that may hide some problems. 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. code coverage, deploy, drupal automated staging toolkit, drush, simpletest and auto test??? 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. If I had to improve the above naive method I'd start from writing a script that given a patch url: * update from cvs * restore db connection setting * apply the patch Second thing I'd do would be to replicate the simpletest environment and start testing the patch. Then I'd choose a set of "important modules" and see if patches or HEAD breaks them. I think this looks a bit more tricky and may require some rcs wizardry especially if I've my modules to test too. Another thing I'd like to learn to do better is how to maintain modified drupal core, supposing I submitted patch waiting and I'd like to check if they still works when I update to HEAD/review a patch and mix svn (or any rcs of choice) with drupal cvs. A DVCS could come handy here... but... that's not the point here. The material about how to put up a dev/review environment is sparse. Something that may be interesting and I would like to read more about or see them grouped or add some glue so that it would be possible to guide people to a more rationalised dev/review environment: Using CVS to maintain a Drupal website http://drupal.org/node/93966 R. Keeping Your Local and Remote Sites Synchronized http://drupal.org/node/120617 Drupal development server configuration http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/drupal-dev-server K. Moving Entire Drupal Site with Databases http://drupal.org/node/120627 Migrating Database Changes From Development to Live Websites http://drupal.org/node/199771 Drupal Performance Measurement & Benchmarking http://drupal.org/node/282862 Drupal with safe mode enabled and open basedir http://drupal.org/node/82223 More than one Drupal site on one machine http://drupal.org/node/274 Transforming a default table names installation into a prefix table names installation http://drupal.org/node/195758 How-To: Virtual Hosting with Drupal http://drupal.org/node/80472 -- Ivan Sergio Borgonovo http://www.webthatworks.it