4.6.1 release process proposal

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Hi guys,

I have a bit of an experiment in mind for our first post-4.6 point
release.  Stephan has been doing a fabulous job as release manager, but,
as is the case with all of us, he doesn't always have enough time to put
in to keep releases churning out as timely as we'd hope.  Plus, building
and testing all the tarballs takes a huge amount of time, and is
incredibly tedious.  It's not uncommon for it to be a multi-day process,
which, frankly, kinda sucks.

So, I'd like to grab a page from how GNOME (and undoubtedly others) do
it.  The idea is basically:

Building and submitting the release tarball is the responsibility of the
module maintainer.

A little more fleshed out:

1.  The release manager sets a date and time.
2.  Module maintainers are required to build and test their own
package(s) and submit them to the release manager software (more on that
later) by the specified time.
3.  Packages that are not uploaded by that time lose out: they become
ineligible to be a part of that release.
4.  After the date and time has passed, the release manager gathers
everything up, does some final checks, updates the website, and all that
good stuff.

As for the release manager software, Jannis wrote a web frontend for the
goodies project so goodies maintainers can easily make and upload
releases.  Fortunately it's also well-suited to our situation as well,
with a few tweaks that Jannis will take care of.  This way maintainers
just need a https account on svn.xfce.org to submit their release tarballs.

Now of course #3 is the potentially controversial part.  Flame on.

	-brian