Re: src snapshot archives?

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 04:56:11PM -0700, George Georgalis wrote:
> 
> What gives? all the files went from a netbsd ftpd to an http
> daemon that I've not heard of and all the mirrors now have a goto
> nyc host readme. (which gave me errors when I tried to download
> files) Yeah, it broke my scripts but the unanswered question is
> why the change? and why no announcement? We are talking about the
> OS distribution here....(???), I mean was there a problem?

You seem to be deeply confused about the status of the daily autobuilds.
These are _not_ released versions of NetBSD, may have severe bugs, are
not guaranteed to ever be there at any particular time, are automatically
deleted and replaced according to a schedule which is opaque to users,
and for various other reasons should not be used for production systems.

They are a convenience.  That's all.  And, for the record, the change
in location was plainly announced the only place these were ever
supposed to have been announced in the first place, the releng.netbsd.org
web server.

If you want a released, supported version of NetBSD, use the releases!
If you want a reliable, supported service for downloading NetBSD
sources as of a given day, use the source tarballs on ftp.netbsd.org
to bootstrap anoncvs, or just use anoncvs directly.  You can even mirror
the entire repository with rsync that way.

If you want a directory that may have, on any given day, a nearly
random collection of robotic builds of various branches of NetBSD,
often with architectures missing, often with serious bugs, for the
convenience of checking out how NetBSD worked on day X or day Y, or
because for some other reason you already know you need NetBSD as of
Frobuary 11, 2016, and you *hope* there might already be a built copy
there, then by all means use the releng server.  But don't tell me we
ever claimed anything there was released or supported, and certainly
not appropriate for using in any kind of critical application.

We document and support a lot of things.  The organization of particular
filesystems on ftp.netbsd.org, in the general case, is *not* one of
those things (there are various special cases, however), and that's
doubly true for the releng daily builds, which have never been described
by us as supported in that way.  It's reasonable to expect us to
actually continue to meet commitments we've actually made; much less so
to expect us to continue to meet ones we have not.

Thor