I’m hoping someone can explain the development snapshot cadence (or point me towards the appropriate documentation), as I’m a little confused by the current behavior.
I see that swift-DEVELOPMENT-SNAPSHOT-2026-01-02-a was tagged a few hours ago, yet there’s no new snapshot for release/6.3, despite the branch having a few new commits on the 2nd. The cadence of snapshots for each branch appears to be irregular too; some occur on a daily basis, others have gaps of a few days.
The docker tags also appear to be based on these snapshots, which makes the ‘nightly’ naming a bit misleading.
This has been asked before, see one of these topics surfaced by Swift Forums search: New trunk development (main) snapshots?
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A new 6.3 snapshot was just tagged. As @mishal_shah and others say in the earlier thread Max linked you, these really aren't regular nightly snapshots, more just periodic commits that happened to pass all those linked platform CI that night. I don't think the CI even all pass the tagged commit, just somewhere around it, as I've seen a snapshot tag that then wouldn't build.
It would be nice if the various companies who want more regular snapshot tags all got together and put some people on fixing the CI more often, as right now it seems to be best effort on the side from a few Swift engineers that Mishal has to regularly corral, hence the sometimes weeks-long delays between snapshot tag builds.
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