Just wanted to re-enforce what Zhang said earlier today about the bleeding edge GNOME Developer’s Kit, now with extra sauce!
What is it? It is a continuous build of GNOME packages all bundled up into a distribution (in this case, Foresight Linux) and distributed in a few different formats, such as ISO and VMware.
"What’s so special about it", you ask? Is it the fact that different image types can be generated at will? Nah, generating images is children’s play, just ask the Suse Studio guys. What is special is the sauce used to not only allow the quick and painless releases but also managing it as if the entire system was under a version control. Did I say “as if”? I meant to say, “manage it under a version control”! If you want to try this succulent sauce, ask your favorite release and management provider for conary!
So Zhang has created a mechanism that allows him to package (and maintain and update) the GNOME applications directly from their respective Git repositories on a daily basis and bundling it all up under a distribution. Every day you can then ask PackageKit to update your system to whatever was built the previous day (or you can run sudo conary updateall from the command line) and check what new things have arrived.
If you are a developer, you could then push your code to your repository and see what it looks like running under the GNOME Developer’s Kit without having to jump through many hoops!
If you are a contributor, you could test these applications and report issues right away to the developers so that they can look into it. Better yet, you could even generate a patch and send it along with your report! Want to kick it up a notch? Learn how to package that same application with your patches and play with it before sending it in!
If you’re a translator or writing docs, imagine being able to see the application you’re trying to translate running right in front of you! As the GNOME Developer’s Kit already comes with a lot of tools such as gettext, intltool and poEdit, you got your work cut out for you!
So, are you interested? Go download it right now and join us on #foresight on irc.freenode.net today!