> Does anyone have any insight on the release architecture for netbsd ?

Yeah, it's tribal knowledge contained mostly in the port-masters' brains.

> I've read the release(7) page but it is fairly generic. In particular I'd 
> like to know what constitutes a "real" and "complete" snapshot release. 

So would I, and I built half of 1.4.2.	[badda-BOMP-tssh]

> Further the miniroot doesn't appear to have a kernel or boot program on it.

In that case the only way to use it would be to netboot a kernel, and use
the miniroot as NFS root.

> How would you build an install tape?

Sorry, can't help you there. I'm pretty clueless about what goes onto tapes.

> Boot floppies are equally curious. But in that case you pretty much have to 
> copy a miniroot into ram and instantiate it.

Most install kernels now contain a tiny root filesystem embedded within them,
so the floppy only needs to be able to load a kernel and get it running.

> Any insights from anyone on what the "real" way to do this is?  A pointer 
> perhaps to a netbsd "release master tutorial"?

My current project is to fix it so that
	cd /usr/src/distrib; make
does the right thing and is adequately self-documenting.
I've barely gotten started, so don't expect to see anything in the tree.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com