How Can Coders Give Access To Bleeding Edge Development Binaries To Help Their Non-Techie Contributors?

How can KDE developers find ways to make binary packages of bleeding-edge code directly available to be run by usability experts for early feedback?

And if you are less interested in cooperating with usability people (like mornfall ;-P ), you may still ask yourself:

• How can KDE developers make their bleeding-edge packages available to beta-testers?
• How let translators see (in their actual, lively GUI context) the strings they work on?
• How to enable art designers to actually *run* a program they are contributing icons and other artwork for?
• How can these groups of non-technical KDE contributors (who are not typically compiling KDE every night from the latest checked-out sources) get a full preview of what will go out to our users on Release Day?
• How can this happen long before the final release, practically 5 minutes after the code was written and compiled, and long before there are official packages created by everyone's favorite distro?

At aKademy I discussed this question with various people. By now everyone in the KDE community is aware of one of my proposed solutions (or that's what I like to think): use an NX or FreeNX driven KDE Application Server, and provide remote access to the programs in question.

But you surely do go wrong if you imagine that my only occupation is NX. I have another, complementing proposal about how to tackle this same problem. One that is an especially nice fit in cases where testers and users do not have network connections.

One that works for Live CD distributions (Knoppix, Kanotix) as well as for Debian, SimplyMEPIS, Linspire, Ubuntu, Kubuntu and openSUSE/SUSE Linux 10.0.

I am currently working on a little Dot article outlining the proposal. (No, it's got nothing to do with NX.)

Be curious.