Hi Stephen,

My understanding is that some of the packages in the development builds 
are still under legal review and can't be made public.

The development builds are important for the desktop community from my 
perspective. That gives everyone in the community a low level entry to 
participate: everyone can contribute by using it and report bugs, 
contributors can develop new features, fix/verify bugs on the latest 
GNOME environment. And when it goes to the stable release, the quality 
assurance can be partly provided with this efforts. This must be the 
original objective that the development builds are provided for download.

As we migrate to pkg and OpenSolaris development model, it'll be better 
to have an unstable/test repository in the desktop community to embrace 
all the packages that are still in development state (GNOME 2.25/26 
packages/Firefox 3.1beta/Thunderbird 3.0beta for example). A 
package-based delivery mechanism (not sure whether pkg can support this 
or not) could be helpful to identify/fix the problem in a timely 
fashion. One big advantage of OpenSolaris is ZFS rollback. The 
cutting-edge users can definitely benefit from this feature even if the 
development builds are broken.

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks,
-Alfred

Stephen Browne wrote:
> On the front page of the JDS project page on opensolaris.org.
>
> http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/jds/ 
>
> there is the following text:
>
> "Download, Install and Run!
> The latest binary packages are always available at the JDS download 
> center <http://dlc.sun.com/osol/jds/downloads/current/>, along with 
> details of how you can install them. We currently only have packages 
> available for Solaris Nevada, both for x86 and SPARC. These packages 
> must always be considered as developer releases, a reflection of the 
> latest code that we are working off. They are not suitable for 
> production systems and may contain instabilities"
>
> The link is a 404 and has been for a long time.  The downloads 
> location also doesn't have any of the old builds that used to be 
> hosted there.
>
> Are there ever going to be builds there?  Should this text be removed?
>
> How is anyone who doesn't work for SUN supposed to get the latest 
> development builds?
>
> Stephen.

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