One feature request, which may be difficult to implement, and may not be worth it:
It would be nice to somehow support running tests for patches which require changes that span core/MR/HDFS. As it stands, I believe an HDFS patch will be built and run against a trunk jar, but if this HDFS patch requires some not-yet-committed work that's being done in a HADOOP JIRA, the HDFS tests will fail. Obviously, just getting hudson QA running again is a necessary pre-requisite for this. :) Aaron