I was actually thinking it might be nice to have staging as more of a fluid concept using VMs.  We could set up a semi-permanent staging VM that gets updated with trunk of everything every {day, week, whatever}, but also have other VMs available for upgrade testing, and testing individual changes.  That way, for instance, if you need to test a dispatcher change that affects a certain type of board you don't have at home, you can simply wait for one of those boards to become available in the lab, mark it offline, bring up a vm and do some testing with it.  Likewise, it could be used to setup and test an invasive change to the dashboard.  All that would be required is a few static port mappings on the firewall, and a server capable of handling a few KVM sessions (which I'd like to look at getting soon for this purpose and others).

Thanks,

Paul Larson