comment one, my cvs updates on 56k take considerably less time than 6 hours, though it still takes quite some time. Focusing the shell helps, as quite a bit of cvs update is local computing. comment two, from all I know, leaf is gone.

isn't leaf leaving mozilla to work elsewhere?
iirc, that's what someone said at this year's dev day.

does he read your blog?

Yes, yes, leaf did leave the Foundation (and those on Terminus and the Four Kingdoms wept). I ran into him at OSCON 2004 (he happens to live in the Portland area), and he mentioned something about still being the guy responsible for the builds.

I received an e-mail a few minutes ago that said the Windows nightlies were the i586-msvc files. Is that correct? I always remember those files being there, and downloading mozilla-win32-nightly.zip .

If your dialup connection is slow, try -z 9 instead of -z 3. It's not recommended for fast networks because it takes a lot more processor on both ends. However, if your connection is reasonably fast but has latency issues, you'd probably better stick to zips. CVS connections are hell for high-latency networks.

Following your advice, I managed to complete the cvs update! AOL did disconnect me once (it did take 4 hours for this update, but the tree I'd updated was two months old), but thankfully, I was able to reconnect quickly before it timed out and threw a bailout error.

I'm building the tree now on my Linux box.

On a side note, the actual update file pulls took ninety minutes, roughly. This is not good if the tree suddenly goes red or orange in the midst of the pull. There has to be some way to specify a time which the CVS server should use on its clock for the pull. That way, I can quarantine myself against the possibility of a red pull.

I'm thinking a Perl script would be appropriate here, one that sets the time in .mozconfig and then calls the make command.