HEADS UP: Release build system changes happening in 2025

Hi all,

The FreeBSD Foundation, sponsored by the Sovereign Tech Agency, is funding
work this year which will be affecting the FreeBSD build process, and release
building in particular.  The main goal is to allow the entire release process
to run without special privileges (aka root); subsidiary goals include
improving the build process documentation so that release building also
doesn't require any special knowledge.  The goal is to have this work
completed before 15.0.

This should not affect users of FreeBSD release images -- the images will look
the same regardless of how they are built -- and the effect on people running
'make buildworld buildkernel installkernel installworld' should be minimal.

Organizations building products based on FreeBSD which involve changes to the
release process will probably need to set aside some time to merge this work
into their tree; in particular, if you have local patches to release/*, you
can expect to see merge conflicts at some point this year when you run 'git
rebase'.

If you have any questions or concerns about this work, please don't hesitate
to contact me (I might be able to help, or I might pass you along to the
Foundation people who are managing this project).

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