doc/en/snapshots/index.sgml
2006-04-09 11:55:16 +00:00

117 lines
4.9 KiB
Text

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" [
<!ENTITY base CDATA "..">
<!ENTITY date "$FreeBSD: www/en/snapshots/index.sgml,v 1.15 2006/02/05 00:24:01 ceri Exp $">
<!ENTITY title "FreeBSD Snapshot Releases">
<!ENTITY % navincludes SYSTEM "../includes.navdownload.sgml"> %navincludes;
<!ENTITY % includes SYSTEM "../includes.sgml"> %includes;
<!ENTITY url.snapshots "ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots">
]>
<!-- $FreeBSD: www/en/snapshots/index.sgml,v 1.15 2006/02/05 00:24:01 ceri Exp $ -->
<html>
&header;
<h2>What Are Snapshots?</h2>
<p>As part of an ongoing effort to improve the overall release process
<em>before</em> a release actually slips out the door with problems,
we are now periodically producing interim test releases called
<em>snapshots</em>.
These snapshots will be very similar to full releases,
except that they will be somewhat more minimal.</p>
<h2>Getting Snapshots</h2>
<p>The latest snapshots made available are the following:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="&url.snapshots;/Mar_2006/">Snapshots in March, 2006</a></li>
<li><a href="&url.snapshots;/Feb_2006/">Snapshots in February, 2006</a></li>
<li><a href="&url.snapshots;/Jan_2006/">Snapshots in January, 2006</a></li>
<!-- template for adding a new entry:
<li><a href="&url.snapshots;/Feb_2005/">Snapshots in February, 2005 (alpha, amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, sparc64)</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="&url.snapshots;/Feb_2005/RELNOTES.TXT">abridged release notes</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
-->
</ul>
<p>If a snapshot for your architecture or the version of
FreeBSD that you require is not available from the
directories above, older snapshots are usually available
from <a href="&url.snapshots;">&url.snapshots;</a>. It
is worth checking there to see if a snapshot that meets
your need is present.</p>
<p>Currently the snapshots of
<a href="&base;/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html#CURRENT">7-CURRENT</a>,
<a href="&base;/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html#STABLE">6-STABLE</a>,
and <a
href="&base;/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html#STABLE">5-STABLE</a>
are released monthly in URLs in the format
<tt>&url.snapshots;/&lt;month&gt;_&lt;year&gt;/</tt>
where <tt>&lt;year&gt;</tt> is the year,
<tt>&lt;month&gt;</tt> is the month the snapshot was released.
Each snapshot directory might contain a <tt>RELNOTES.TXT</tt>
file which outlines the changes for the particular snapshot.</p>
<h2>Things You Might Want to Know</h2>
<p>In particular, before getting and installing a snapshot release,
be aware of following:</p>
<ul>
<li>The snapshots are primarily for
testing purpose and not fully tested compared to the releases.
They may include experimental or degraded features that
can corrupt your existing system.</li>
<li>The major release number will not be changed in the
main distribution for each snapshot.
It will <em>only</em> be changed on the boot floppies
so that you know when the snapshot was made.
These are <em>not</em> releases, these are <em>snapshots</em>,
and it is important that this distinction be preserved.
Although people can and will, of course, refer to snapshots
by date in mail or netnews, do not confuse them.</li>
<li>Finally, we will not necessarily update the documentation.
For example, <tt>README</tt> may still refer
to a previous release. This is because that is much less important
than getting the real bug fixes and new features out for testing.
Please do not send a bug report about the documentation.</li>
</ul>
<p>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!</p>
<h2>Other Resources</h2>
<p>Here are some related resources. Note that they are managed by
other people than the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team.
These sites provide FreeBSD snapshots in a form of "live filesystem"
and bootable ISO images on a daily basis.
For details, visit the following links and contact them directly
if you have any questions.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://snapshots.jp.FreeBSD.org/">FreeBSD snapshots by jp.FreeBSD.org</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://snapshots.se.FreeBSD.org/">FreeBSD snapshots by se.FreeBSD.org</a>.</li>
</ul>
&footer;
</body>
</html>