On Sep 5,  3:19pm, David Maxwell wrote:
>Quoting  Brian Gaeke:  Internet E-Mail: <brg@dgate.org>
>> Well, people *do* already put up binary snapshots on their own. From what
>> I've gathered there's not all that much difference between a reasonably
>> stable binary snapshot and an unofficial release; on the mac68k side we
>> have the "wormey tarballs" and the "puma snapshots", which lots of people
>> run because so much progress has been made since 1.0. Am I missing the
>> point here?
>
>I'd like to see the wormey and puma things come under one heading, preferably
>cross platform too. I know we won't be able to generate completely 
>in-sync releases for every platform, but the numbering scheme should not
>give the same number for different platforms build from different sources.
>idento avoid what Brian Gillham mentioned (in another message) about John,
>Dick, and Harry's Linux releases.

I dunno if Linux has a distribution-building tool; it probably wouldn't
have those problems if it did.  Such a tool _was_ created for the NetBSD-1.0
release, and all snapshots built since then have the same standard format
and files, with the only variations being those things that have been added
to or removed from the source tree (i.e. new or obsolete binaries).

What do you mean by "the wormey and puma things come under one heading"?
I'm sure Allen builds his when he feels the need; I build mine when several
things come together: stable sources, good sup, several days free time (it
takes about 70 hours to do a build from scratch on a Mac II ;-), and the
feeling that my binaries are lagging the sources and need to be updated. :)

As far as having multiple versions available -- while eskimo has several
hundred MB of space for users to make stuff available for FTP, the space
is not unlimited, and when it runs out, people will be asked to cut back
on the space they use.  I prefer to keep my usage at a minimum, and just
make the latest -current available.  Other sites probably have the same
problems with disk capacity.  Just consider the amount of space taken by
N versions of X platforms at 15MB per snapshot...

Now, I'm not saying that checkpointed snapshots are a bad idea -- just
take time and space into consideration. ;-)

>It'll be work, but as I said in a previous message, this is one way some less
>technical people could contribute to NetBSD. (Myself included ;-)

Yah, that's why I do it -- it's what floats my boat. :)

~Steve

-- 
Steven R. Allen - allen@cssg4.cslab.ds.boeing.com
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