package tarballs

Hi,

I'm just wondering if there is a possibility of providing automatically
generated tarballs more recent then the last release 0.82.

In the current situation, it's a challenge to automate the integration
of recent work into a distribution like mingw-cross-env, which does not
host package tarballs itself.  Mingw-cross-env could maintain and
distribute a patch for 0.82 to take it up to a later revision in CVS,
but that's a lot of work and it would be a big patch.

This would probably also make it easier for other distros to provide
FreeTDS.

Just a clearly named and archived prerelease or snapshot tarball at more
or less regular intervals would be a big help. It doesn't have to be
certified as "release" or having any other air of stability.

It would be really great if the standard naming convention was used so
that the name of the tarball file indicates the version (or timestamp)
and the directory created by unpacking has the same name without the
.tar.bz2 suffix. You never know what you'll find when you download and
unpack
http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/freetds/current/freetds-current.tgz :).

The alternative would be for mingw-cross-env installations to
automatically acquire sources from the CVS repo. Would that actually be
good, or would it be better not to have all the users of mingw-cross-env
getting their FreeTDS sources from CVS?

I don't want to seem to be complaining, just grateful for all the work
on FreeTDS. It's a valuable package to have in mingw-cross-env and I'd
like to show it off.

-Mark