Sitting back and reading the various PMDs over the last week or so, and then delving back into history a ways, I think that I could summarise the current status quo regarding PM developments as
- There are some, a few or many doesn't really matter, good ideas for fixes, improvements and enhancements to the PM site and it's code base.
- There is a glut of active PMDevers prepared to work on creating patches and fixes.
- There is already a backlog of untested, unauthorised patches and fixes awaiting testing and approval.
- There are, for very good reasons, a very limited number of gods, and apparently even less currently active gods, with the powers of approval/application.
It is the lack of time on behalf of the latter component, along with a lack of a safe test environment that is the bottleneck that prevents patches being tested in a timely manner, with the knock on effect that many of the would-be PMDevers fall by the wayside discouraged.
Making the current PM codebase available so that non-gods might set up an offline test server is not an option for reasons of security.
Using the available Everything-2 codebase for this purpose is not viable as the PM codebase has so many custom patches and fixes already, and is based upon a much earlier Everything engine anyway, that the value of testing with the available version would be minimal if measurable.
Would it be possible, a huge amount of work etc. to set up a band-width/cpu constrained, version of PM running on (one of) the existing server(s) that could have patches applied by lesser mortals than the gods, so that they might be exercised in a non-critical environment?
If they stand up to use by either a selected audience of users PMDevers+Power users+gods, or just whomever was around to see a link posted in the CB, "Please hit this link and tell me what you see", over a period of a week or so, and the associated logs didn't show anything untoward....
That might simplify the process, and ease the workload involved on behalf of the gods, and partially alleviate the bottlenecks?
"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." -Richard Buckminster Fuller
If I understand your problem, I can solve it! Of course, the same can be said for you.