diff --git a/HACKING b/HACKING
index 12a1f013..30684c67 100644
--- a/HACKING
+++ b/HACKING
@@ -1,14 +1,33 @@
-HACKING
--------
+  HACKING
+  =======
 
-virt-manager is tied very closely with both libvirt and virtinst. If building
-virt-manager from source, it is recommended that you have at least the latest
-libvirt release, and an upstream virtinst checkout.
+virt-manager is tied closely with libvirt, so it's recommended to try and run
+the latest libvirt code if using virt-manager from an upstream checkout. See
+http://libvirt.org/downloads.html
 
 We use glade-3 for building virt-manager's UI. It is recommended you have
 a fairly recent version of glade-3: if a small UI change seems to rewrite the
 entire glade file, you likely have a too old (or too new :) glade version.
 
-Before submitting any patches, please run 'make check-pylint' to check for
-basic syntax errors/warnings. This command requires the pylint and python-pep8
-packages to be installed.
+The following commands will be useful for anyone writing patches:
+
+    python setup.py test      : Run local unit test suite
+    python setup.py pylint    : Run a pylint script against the codebase
+    python setup.py test_urls : Test our install media fetching infrastructure
+
+Any patches shouldn't change the output of 'test' or 'pylint'. Check
+requires pylint and python-pep8 to be installed.
+
+Our pylint script uses a blacklist rather than a whitelist approach,
+so it could throw some false positives or useless messages. If you think
+your patch exposes one of these, bring it up on the mailing list.
+
+If 'python-coverage' is installed, you can run 'coverage -r' after 'test'
+to see a code coverage report.
+
+'test_urls' only needs to be run if the patch is against the url fetching
+code (virtinst/OSDistro.py). This stuff is notoriously fragile, so running
+'test_urls' is a must. If you are debugging a certain url failure, you can
+use the --match option to specify specific distros to test.
+
+'test*' have a --debug option if you are hitting problems.
diff --git a/todo.txt b/todo.txt
index e2ca8920..e46d8f5c 100644
--- a/todo.txt
+++ b/todo.txt
@@ -11,7 +11,8 @@ virtinst merge bits:
         why isn't distutils doing msgmerge? maybe I'm missing something
     merge pylint scripts, make sure there are no warnings
     break out osdistro bits so we don't need to carry virt-install.pod
-    merge README, HACKING, INSTALL, autobuild.sh
+    merge README, reference that we merged virtinst and see that repo for
+        old NEWS, etc.
 
 is dbus uniqueness still working? I dropped the service file but it
     shouldn't be necc.