As software is being developed, before it is "released", the software in its unreleased or "unfinished" state may still be quite usable at any given moment in time, as devs are making changes to it and either adding features or preparing it for a future release.
A daily build usually means that some machine grabs the unreleased software every night at one particular moment in time, compiles it, and puts it up for developers to test.
Obviously, it may or may not be usable, depending on what stage of development it's at, what the release strategy for that project is, etc. What you are testing is a snapshot of unfinished software at one moment in time.
Sometimes, the software may well be very nearly ready for release, in which case it'll often work quite well already. If the developers have declared a "freeze" it means that they minimise changes, only fixing existing bugs. During that stage, a nightly build of a piece of software is more likely to be quite usable since it's getting close to release time.
If you are talking about daily builds of the Live CD or a Installer CD, then these are builds made of the installation medium based based on snapshots of the current development process. All the above applies. These should usually work pretty well due to their release strategy, though it's not uncommon for some things to be broken.
There's no point installing any piece of software from a daily build unless you are testing features that are currently in development and not yet released, and you are willing to put up with it being a bit broken or unfinished.
The date-time warning is new in gcc 4.9 I think - it is possibly turned on implicitly by -Wall
(and turned into an error implicitly by -Werror
).
You could try turning it off explicitly using the -Wno-
form i.e. by adding
-Wno-error=date-time
to the CFLAGS
.
Best Answer
(This is a copy of my answer on ubuntu-devel.)
With very few exceptions, nearly all of Debian's work on this will just be going into the packages that form part of the package build toolchain, and as such Ubuntu will inherit it over the natural course of merging and syncing packages from Debian. The possible exceptions are things like the proposed libfaketime etc. preloads that we might insert into builds; I'd certainly be keen to keep up to date with things Debian does in this area, not just to protect against intrusion but also because there are immediate practical benefits to doing so (safer multiarch handling).
I'm not aware that this has been specifically discussed within Canonical, mostly because most of the relevant people are pretty heads-down working on the Ubuntu Touch product at the moment; but I also think there's work to be done in Debian first before we pick anything up.