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, 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:

• 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 system.
• 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. Although people can and will, of course, refer to snapshots by date in mail or netnews, do not confuse them.
• Finally, we will not necessarily update the documentation. For example, README 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.

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!

Getting Snapshots

Currently the snapshots of 6-CURRENT and 5-STABLE are released monthly in URLs in the format ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/snapshots/<release>/<month>_<year>/<arch>/ where <release> is the release type (6-CURRENT or 5-STABLE, for example), <year> is the year, <month> is the month the snapshot was released, and <arch> is the architecture which the snapshot for. Each snapshot directory contains a RELNOTES.TXT file which outlines the changes for the particular snapshot.

The snapshots currently available are the following:

• 5-STABLE February, 2005
  • abridged release notes