One of my largest Drupal installs which supports the Beehive family sites is quite a lot of core, contrib and custom code. Most of the updates are scripted if at all possible but since we have more than one actual install of the same code base and our maintenance days can vary for different installs I kept on running into the issue where there was no easy way to determine which release the install was actually running.  

I've been home from DrupalCON for over I week and it's taken a while to de-DrupalCon-ize and arrange my thoughts in somewhat relevant order. Not only was this conference overwhelming because of the awesome sessions but also because of the people - 3000 is a massive crowd! But one step at a time...