I would like to test which nightly build between QGIS 1.8 and 2.0 caused a certain change in QGIS behavior. I know that there are very convenient exe files of weekly builds available on http://qgis.org/downloads/weekly/ . Yet, their temporal scope is limited. They do not go back in time enough for my purposes.
The archive at http://download2.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/release/qgis/qgis-dev/ goes back to the very beginnings, but offers only *.tar.bz2 format. Is it possible to use them with osgeo4W “local directory” installation? I have tried with the current osgeo4W version, but the files I downloaded to the local qgis_dev subdirectory were not recognized (osgeo4w continues to offer only the most recent and the previous versions for install). I have downloaded also an old 1.8 osgeo4w version but it does not have the GUI and I do not know what to write in the command line in order to install 1.9 nightly builds.
Well, I really hope there is something more convenient than to compile the source code “manually” according to the methods described on github.