During Macworld San Francisco, the Leopard development team — shifting its focus from the sprinter’s work of getting 10.5.0 the first point-update out the door to the marathon-runner’s slow and steady work of point update development, bug fixes and supporting both hardware and software engineers from various projects across the Infinite Loop campus in ensuring their products play nice with Leopard — quietly seeded the first major build of 10.5.2, 9C16.

Some readers who have become early adopters of the new “Harpertown” based Mac Pro may recognize this version as the very build which shipped with their machines, though it remains versioned 10.5.1 on those systems. 9C16 is far more than just a collection of Mac Pro-specific support files, however; as a matter of fact, it already sports one of the longest changelogs we’ve seen associated with an initial point-update build in recent memory…..

That the same build could be versioned 10.5.1 on currently shipping Mac Pros and 10.5.2 in a just-released developer seed is a tad unusual; this fact has both confused and interested many rumor-mongers.

Far from being specific to the Mac Pro, the build actually contains a vast list of bug fixes, and a small but very significant number of new features; notably, new functionality includes the ability to specify any mounted network volume (previously, only local peripherals were supported and auto-detected; now whenever any type of volume is mounted, local or remote, Time Machine will ask if you want to use it) as a backup target and any Mac with 10.5.2 will be able to “share” its optical drive with other machines/devices on the network just as one would share any other type of storage volume via Apple File Server/Personal File Sharing or “Windows Sharing” aka Samba/SMB.

Although this is the first seed to be offered up for third-party developers to work with, several early-milestone builds of 10.5.2 built up a huge number of bug fixes. The list of system components/bundled applications updated is so long that it makes more sense to simply say that 10.5.2 is pretty much a top-to-bottom overhaul that spares no effort in addressing every known Leopard issue in Cupertino’s to-do list…..

Stay tuned for follow-up reports on the next few builds as we complete our new internal “source’s forum” where we will be letting developers and others with embargoed, sensitive or not-for-public-consumption/”background-only” information share directly with each other and the all-new Rumors staff…..this will allow us to post much more frequent, detailed reports on developmental software from Apple and elswhere, and we think everyone will be amazed with what’s in store for the next few weeks so don’t miss a beat!