Okay, so I've had basically this same idea for a long time now (I called it Devbuntu too...), but this guy beat me to the punch on blogging about it:
Devbuntu.
I think that this idea, while simple, could prove a valuable asset to the Debian / Ubuntu community - both to its contributors and the more general user-base.
I know there have been times when I've wanted to work with the most recent version of a language or IDE on my Ubuntu installations, and I've often discovered that I needed to upgrade a lot of the dependencies then compile things by hand...not terribly difficult, but certainly time-consuming and probably frustrating to those who are less experienced.
Case in point: the
monodevelop project. At least in the past (I haven't checked for a few months), Ubuntu seems to be running several revisions / features behind. As a .NET programmer by trade, I'm very interested in the
Mono Framework, so I try to keep up with what's happening with it.
A simple
"sudo apt-get build-dep $PROGRAM" then compiling from source will usually do the trick, but it still seems to me that it'd be more beneficial to keep your users on similarly configured installations of programs that they'll be using to develop with.
Maybe
Canonical is just waiting for more people to voice their desire for such a platform.
