Aegir is very useful for development, but it's workflows aren't geared towards it. I think the addition of some simple features could make a big difference here. Specifically, it'd be useful to be able to:

  1. re-install a test site
  2. re-build a platform in place
  3. purge sites that experienced an error during installation
  4. purge platforms that failed to build or delete.

(1) is already handled by hosting_reinstall, which I've upgraded to Aegir3 in my sandbox.
(2) should just be a matter of running drush make again in the platform root. It'd be useful to allow the path/url of the makefile to be changed here too.
As for (3), some errors during installation can lead to a non-functional site that cannot be deleted from the front-end. Especially since it's unlikely that the site will backup properly. This requires a fairly detailed knowledge to remove completely. However, these could largely be automated.
(4) is similar to (3), just for platforms. See: #2242687: Add 'purge' tasks

Other possible utility functions that might fall under this category: #2107349: obsolete databases housekeeping and #2063589: Allow site install errors to be ignored.

For 'purge' tasks, removing obsolete dbs, etc. we may need to prompt for additional user input as well.

Of course, all of these should be tucked away in a feature set with appropriate warnings about the dangers of such tasks, appropriate permissions, etc.

I'm going to start by promoting my hosting_reinstall sandbox to a full project and go form there. I'd like to add this to the 'experimental' features after a bit more testing.

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ergonlogic created an issue.