kolab2! open source q/a?

Thomas Zander noted that open source's reach in the Q/A and documentation world is slim; Boudewijn Rempt notes that many bugs are revealed post-release due to a lack of pre-release testers; and just the other day on irc Jess Hall wondered aloud why we don't have someone who runs a continuous tinderbox build. when it comes to quality assurance (aka q/a), we've relied on the "many eyes makes all bugs shallow" concept. the new challenge here is that the userbase has evolved and expects released software to be gold master ready. to be honest, we manage to hit that every few releases and we do so by leveraging the many-eyes principle in the releases in between.

what would help speed up that process so we have fewer "miss" releases and more "hit" ones? getting more people to use software prior to it being released. it would be nice to see q/a people get on board, and that would certainly help. clee has started to do some of this type of stuff for kicker recently and it's been great. but we getting more people in front of the software and using it as they normally do is really hard to top. this is how we find really odd corner cases, like not showing the comment for an application menu button in kicker in the mouse over tips, with near zero investment on the part of the project. the question is how do we get more people in front of it?

Kurt will pipe up here and say, "NX! we can have an NX server with KDE betas and even alphas and people can test it!" well, i think that will only work if people use it as their day-to-day desktop. if we cold offer it as a "desktop that follows you wherever you go, with X MB of storage!" service which you can get an account on for the small price of also being our beta guinea pigs, maybe that would work.

but enough about q/a. that's boring, right? ;P i installed kolab2 on kubuntu this week for a production environment. using the debian binaries it was a 15 minute job and bam! bob's (not) my uncle and i've got imap and pop (ssl + plain varieties), groupware, spam and virus filtering... and all wrapped lovingly in a nice web admin interface

but that wasn't the end of it. one of the requirements for this project was webmail. i looked into installing horde and imp within the kolab2 install but finally decided to just install it separately. half an hour later:

sweet! well, there were some bugs. in particular with the free/busy support, but it was an easy fix. i've submitted the patch to the horde bug system and posted it on the kolab-devel email list as well. hopefully it gets picked up and put into mainstream.

that said, horde and imp is far more difficult to set up than it ought to be, though the process is fairly well documented. i've collected my configuration changes so that next time i do this it'll be a 10 minute job instead of a thirty minute one. seeing as we'll probably be doing this with plain-jane postfix+imap installations as well, i'll end up with a set of configs for that as well.

my next nut to crack is how to roll out these sorts of changes after the OS has been installed. stay tuned.