[users at bb.net] Packagers: upcoming RC builds

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

If you're not packaging buildbot for a downstream distribution, you
can stop reading now.

We are hoping to start 0.9.0 release-candidate builds soon.  0.9.0 is
a big jump from 0.8.x for everyone, packagers included.

Probably the most important difference is that Buildbot now has
several more packages, notably buildbot-www (the web frontend),
buildbot-waterfall-view (the waterfall plugin for the frontend), and
buildbot-console-view (similar).  These are all browser-side apps,
written in Coffeescript and compiled to JS.  They use lots of npm
modules, which I know Linux distros absolutely love.  We package them
as Python dists, basically by running the JS compilation and
browserification process, then shipping the results as "data" attached
to a very small Python module.

We are also renaming the `buildbot-slave` package to
`buildbot-worker`.  There will be no buildbot-worker-0.8.x, nor any
buildbot-slave-0.9.x.  However, buildbot-slave can talk to a 0.9.x
master, so users have a good transition strategy.

On the positive side, we've fixed the pinned SQLAlchemy and
SQLAlchemy-Migrate versions, so we're using the latest versions of
both packages.  We also dropped support for a lot of older versions of
dependencies, although that probably will affect you less.

I'm sure there are other differences that I haven't realized will
cause you grief.  I promise I'll buy a round next time we meet :)  At
any rate, please have a look sooner rather than later, as we still
have some flexibility to adjust our releases, but once we ship 0.9.0
to pypi we'll be more constrained.

Dustin