Yes, things are a bit bumpy right now

Hi 15.0 users,

Some of you may have noticed that things are a bit bumpy right now.  This
is because of the upcoming release -- we're currently in "code slush", which
in theory means "don't break stuff" but in practice means "oh no there's a
release coming I need to get stuff into the tree ASAP".

Which, to be fair, is partly my doing since I've explicitly been encouraging
people to hurry up and get stuff into the tree so that things break *now* and
not *later*.

In any event, as Mark Millard noted (thank you Mark, I should have written
about this earlier) the pkg repositories currently have a very small subset
of packages, and will be this way until full package builds complete.  This
was necessary because library updates (mainly libcrypto but not just that)
meant that the existing packages couldn't run on the latest HEAD, and this
was preventing me from even doing weekly snapshot builds.

So I asked pkgmgr to do a special "only the packages re@ needs" build since
that could complete quickly -- and as of a few hours ago we have a full
snapshot build for 15.0, including install media, VM images, cloudware, and
OCI containers.

I'm *hoping* that things will be a bit smoother from here on; there may be a
bit of a hiccup with wifi (Bjoern has mentioned a potential KBI break coming
up) but the kmods repository builds quickly so with luck that won't cause too
many problems.  With luck, we'll have weekly snapshots from now on following
the normal schedule (every Thursday).

We're still on schedule for stable/15 to branch on September 5th, at which
point we'll have 15.0-ALPHA1/2/3/4 coming out weekly before releng/15.0 is
branched at the start of October.

-- 
Colin Percival
FreeBSD Release Engineering Lead & EC2 platform maintainer
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid