Back in the old days (before 7.09 was released), there was a download directory called "snapshots" - I even recall seeing the schedule of what had been built (and whether or not the compilation was error-free), and when the next build was due.  Is that entirely gone now? Feel free to call me lazy, but I was quite happy to reap the benefits of other people's work!

Sadly Missed: http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/brcm47xx-2.6

there are still snapshots at http://downloads.x-wrt.org/xwrt/kamikaze/snapshots

The buildbot that populated the snapshots dir broke shortly before the 7.09 release. It remained broken and images became quite out of date. I removed the snapshots images after the uclibc upgrade as it broke binary compatibility with the old packages.  Stale potentially unstable images deal more harm than good in my opinion as the primary purpose of the snapshots was to get the latest code out there and tested.

As always. Build your own snapshots...

I couldn't disagree with you anymore regarding this. Just be sure to update to get the latest source before you compile (i.e. svn up, ./scripts/feeds update, make defconfig, make package/symlinks, and perhaps a make menuconfig in your OpenWRT SVN source tree).

Thanks for the explanation / update.  I agree 100% that unstable images are harmful, it's just sad that there's no way to stay on the "bleeding edge" except...

No, thanks. Believe it or not, I have more experience than I need at porting and cross-compiling (If anyone here read Unix World magazine in the late 1980s, you might've seen my article), and I'd rather not go through the exercise of svn, disk space, menuconfig, and pickiness about which version of gcc breaks the code. I don't bake my own bread, sew my own clothes, or build my own Linux kernels, either. As I said, I'm very happy that there are people who are willing and able to put their time and energy into that, I'm just hoping that they'll share their work with us lazy folks.

Well, it's up to you...