Draft: Changes concerning GCC snapshots (and releases)

[Gerald Pfeifer <gerald at pfeifer dot com>]

This is a draft of a message for gcc-announce that I'd like to send to
announce changes caused by my ongoing work on the snapshot machinery.

Comments, both concerning the plan per se and this concrete message are
highly welcome!

Do you prefer "main", "mainline" or "head" to refer to mainline/CVS head
in the names of snapshot directories?

-------- cut draft ---------
I have been working to update how our weekly snapshots (as we distribute
them from ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/gcc/snapshots and many mirror sites) are
run for some time now and have already made the following changes:

 o Weekly snapshots are only available in .bz2 format, which allows
   for sensible smaller archives.

 o We abandoned and removed the gcc_latest_snapshot CVS tag.

 o Diff files now reside in a subdirectory "diffs/" of the respective
   snapshot directory.

The last item also applies to future releases of GCC, which we will
continue to ship in both .gz and .bz2 formats.

In addition, I am working on the following further changes:

 o The names of the snapshot directories shall include the name of the
   relevant branch in GCC's CVS repository in addition to the date, or
   "head" in the case of current mainline.

 o Later, this will also apply to individual archive files.

 o And, finally, we want to provide snapshots both off mainline and the
   currently active release branch (currently, the 3.3 branch).

If you have any questions, comments, or complaints concerning these
changes, please do not hesitate to let us know.

Gerald
-- 
Gerald Pfeifer (Jerry)   gerald@pfeifer.com   http://www.pfeifer.com/gerald/