During the goals office hour that took place on IRC on 15 March 2018, the issue came up of making it as easy as possible for new contributors to setup a development environment so they can start working on all things KDE.
The main idea that surfaced during the initial discussion was to use some sort of virtual environment, you will find the relevant chat text at 17:21:48 to 17:43:28 of the [log](https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2018q1/004519.html). The suggestions were about using either a virtual machine or a docker image. The discussion continued on the mailing list, and this time it was about using [janitor](https://janitor.technology/). There is an [ongoing effort](https://github.com/JanitorTechnology/janitor/issues/300) to update the KDE container offered there.
What's more, at Akademy 2017, @ervin and @dfaure talked about making it easy for newcomers to build and test Applications. They discussed removing the need for make install and implementing solutions around conan.io and flatpak.org. Detailed summary, video and slides can be found [here](https://conf.kde.org/en/akademy2017/public/events/372).
I'm starting this issue so we can continue the discussion and properly track our progress. What is the current status? Can we distinguish any requirements that an ideal implementation would fulfill?
Pinging @ngraham, @Fuchs, @sebas and @adridg as they are the ones I recognize from the people that took part in the discussions so far. Please further ping people I missed or might be interested.