It seems like alot of the work around adding and testing components on gluster is managing a virtualized gluster environment.
i.e. creating VMs and building the environment out.
Im wondering wether a separate github repo (i.e. something like glusterforge/gluster-dev) should be created to support gluster development, where scripts for creating VMs, installing gluster centric development environments, etc.. could go. I for one was thinking of maybe testing and updating this particular gist that i just found
https://gist.github.com/sawanoboly/3826617 for creating 4 VMs on the fly to use gluster 3.4+.