Introduce myself and question about getting CURRENT

[Garrett Cooper]

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Nerius Landys <nlandys at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi guys, I'd like to contribute to the FreeBSD community by testing
> and programming a little in the coming months/years.  I'm a
> mathematician from Berkeley (B.S.), I have been using FreeBSD for
> about 5 years (on a router and on 2 servers) and I come from a strong
> programming background (12+ years).  I'm also currently involved with
> some other open source projects such as GtkRadiant, which is a map
> editor for Quake 3 engine games.  An issue in FreeBSD that I'm
> interested in looking into in the short run is the ath wireless driver
> situation (I've already contacted Adrian).  The two particular issues
> with the ath driver that I'm currently having may very well already be
> resolved in CURRENT, so I'm about to test that.
>
> Anyhow, first things are first.  I need to get CURRENT.  So, what is
> the preferred way to get CURRENT on your system?  I'm very familiar
> with the whole buildkernel/buildworld mechanism and I intend to
> compile CURRENT from source on a continual basis.  The only question I
> have about this is, is the upgrade 8.2 -> CURRENT a supported upgrade
> that will work fairly well?  Or are there some CD image ISOs available
> for a relatively recent CURRENT?  Basically, I'm about to install
> CURRENT on a new system that will be used for testing and development,
> and don't know the preferred way to do this.

Noting the relevant handbook passage:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/updating-upgrading.html .

I personally run `make kernel-toolchain', then `make buildworld
buildkernel' when building on CURRENT. I also use the sources from
svn, not cvs, csup, cvsup. Other FreeBSD folks may use git, hg, etc.
So there's no one right or wrong answer, in terms of build
instructions (as long as you follow the minimum prescribed
instructions in UPDATING), or pulling down sources.

And yes, there are some CURRENT snapshots:

ftp://ftp1.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/

Hopefully that helps get you started on an appropriate path.

Cheers,
-Garrett