FreeBSD Snapshot Releases

What are snapshots?

As part of an ongoing effort to improve the overall release process before a release actually slips out the door with problems that make folks mad, we are now periodically producing interim test releases called snapshots. These snapshots will be very similar to full releases, except that they will be somewhat more minimal. In particular, before getting and installing a snapshot release, be aware of following:

• We generally will not, for example, produce new XFree86 distributions or worry much about the tools directory, unless either of those two things are affected by the changes being tested.
• The major release number will not be changed in the main distribution for each snapshot. It will only be changed on the boot floppies so that you know when the snapshot was made. These are not releases, these are snapshots, and it is important that this distinction be preserved. People can and will, of course, refer to snapshots by date in mail or netnews, we just do not want them to start thinking that Christmas came early and the next release is already out!
• Finally, we will not necessarily update the documentation. If a README still refers to a previous release, well, that is much less important to than getting the real bug fixes and new features out for testing. Complaints about that kind of thing will be quietly ignored. Again, these are snapshots, not releases!

Your feedback on these snapshots is, of course, greatly welcome. They are not just for our benefit - those who are coming to rely on FreeBSD for mission critical applications should welcome a chance to get at more updated bits in a structured fashion. You can also use these snapshots as tangible evidence that your feedback is getting incorporated and that you (hopefully) will not have any unpleasant surprises in the next release. On the other hand, if you do send us hate mail next release and it turns out that you never even tried the snapshots, well, it cuts both ways!

Where to find snapshots

Snapshots for both FreeBSD-CURRENT and FreeBSD-STABLE are available via anonymous FTP from ftp://current.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/. The snapshot releases are in directories named in the format REL-YYYYMMDD-*SNAP where `REL' is the release number (i.e. 5.2-CURRENT or 4.9-STABLE), `YYYY' is the year, `MM' is the month, and `DD' is the day the snapshot was released. Each snapshot directory contains a `RELNOTES.TXT' file which outlines the changes for the particular snapshot.