A few days ago in #mediawiki ^demon made a comment about php 5.4 having a built-in webserver. After a little bit of looking at that we found that when MediaWiki was combined with a standalone copy of 5.4 and the webserver and sqlite support built-in it was possible to startup a quick and easy development instance of MediaWiki with nothing but the MW code and an isolated copy of php. (ie: no real extra dependencies besides what you'd expect on a unix-like OS setup to be able to compile something)
I threw together some bash scripts that will download the latest php 5.4, configure and install it into maintenance/dev/php/, install an sqlite based install of MediaWiki, and startup php's built in development webserver on localhost.
Anyone have a problem with these bash scripts being committed to /trunk/phase3/maintenance/dev/ for anyone checking out MW to use?