Release management and package announcements

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

There is, I think, an overlap between the release management strategy
and the package announcement format thread.

We need to decide what information the package maintainer needs to
supply to the FTP site maintainer for the correct placement of the
package.

Can I take it that following the thread on debian-user the consensus
is that we should now only be making bugfix changes to 0.93, and that
new functionality should go in the 1.0 tree ?

If this is true then we need to copy the whole of the binary area from
0.93 to 1.0, so that 1.0 instantly becomes the `bleeding-edge'
distribution.

I'll post a separate message about how I (as dpkg maintainer) think we
should manage the transition to ELF.

When a package maintainer uploads a package, they need to specify the
destination tree of the files in question.  As I see it the package
might want to go in the stable tree, the development one, both, into
contrib or non-free, or only into a separate experimental directory.

I don't particularly care about how this is represented in the
(machine-readable) dchanges format, and I'd like Bruce to tell Bill
and I how this should be represented.

Somehow the FTP site maintainer's programs also need to know which
section (subdirectory) the files should go in.  I suggest that this
information be provided by the `overrides' file on the FTP site, which
is already used by the npdpkg program which generates the Packages
files.

Is everyone reasonably happy with the above ?

Ian.