Weekly snapshot re-engineering suggestion

[Joe Buck]

> First of all I was wondering if there is a location to download snapshots
> of the mainline.  I'm looking for this since when at work, I cannot access
> the CVS repository.

I suggest requesting your computer security staff to allow access through
the CVS port only for a list of trusted sites, including gcc.gnu.org.  A
number of us have managed to do this.  If your company uses gcc this
should be easy to make a business case for: you wish to be able to verify
that important bugs are fixed.

> It is my understanding that the reason only one branch is available is not
> really a disk space issue, but instead a time issue since CVS server is so
> slow at tagging.  The greater question then should be: are those
> particular CVS snapshot tags even necessary?

While tagging is an issue, disk space, network access, and volunteer labor
are also not unlimited resources.  Even if we had a better source code
control system, we still might want to put out only one stream of
snapshots.