In the past, the release manager has waited until a release is almost ready, and then started building and posting release candidates. Getting set up to generate the release candidates takes longer than expected. The release candidates themselves turn out to be missing files or have other problems that take longer than expected to resolve. I propose we start building daily release snapshots, regardless of where we are in a release cycle. I'm calling these "snapshots" rather than "candidates", since they are really only release candidates late in the release cycle. Building snapshots on a daily basis would have these benefits: * The mechanical procedure would become smooth, and so could eliminate one of the delays that plague the current release process. * The snapshots could be inspected, tested, and otherwise checked for quality control on an ongoing basis. Since release tarball problems could be detected and fixed earlier in the release cycle, this could reduced or eliminated a source of delays. * The release workload could better distributed, since generation of snapshots could be handled by someone other than the release manager. Comments? Would anyone like to volunteer to take this on? They would need a high speed internet connection as the files involved are quite large. --Beman