Working with pre-release versions?

[scotthauck]

Okay, just had my second experience where digging through the pre-release versions of the ESP32 arduino core code turned up bug fixes that got me past blocking issues. So, my questions:

(1) What's the right way to grab pre-release versions of the code? Right now I've been manually applying specific patches from github (by editing with WordPad actually...).
(2) Is there a good way to have multiple versions to build against? That is, would be nice to have concurrent access to both the latest release, and pre-release, perhaps via some switches in the code or the like.
(3) How do people stay on top of the latest patches and open issues? Are folks watching some listing, or just google when they hit an issue?

Thanks!