local development environment

update: it exists, http://drupal.org/sandbox/mlncn/1204336

it should be a drush script that puts files in sites/all/modules/devel
keeps them up-to-date with git
and then enables them

http://drupal.org/project/environment

is just too much overhead.

Basically all the reasonable approaches are here:

A drush command. Text file with modules to enable on dev, and then run it manually or somehow automatically.

drush? make text file with all the modules and git it to drush pm_enable

If we have a defined practice for environment-specific module enabling/disabling and i'd love to disable views_ui, update, etc. on live

It would be run after sync commands-- pull data from live, but then enable update on the test site, and all site building modules on dev

For reasons not known to man nor beast, on XAMPP on Mac OS X (and not XAMP but another all in one WAMP stack, but not that name either) will not work with the wildcard availability host name (%). It will work (or anyhow may work for you, it worked for Agaric!) with the @localhost for host name.

Resolution