Comment 8 for bug 87012

Things are better now, although the current workflow is still clunky. We can now create the next distroseries along well in advance and set its status to FUTURE, which allows us to do things like target bugs to it. That's certainly useful.

However, as far as actually preparing packages goes, what we do at the moment is prepare them in a non-virtualised PPA which thinks it's for the previous distroseries, and copy them into the new distroseries once it opens properly. This at least doesn't involve a separate dak instance or anything like that, and it has allowed us to open the next distroseries within around a day of releasing the previous one for a couple of releases running now; but it's error-prone and rather confusing (why does this changelog say oneiric when it's the toolchain for precise?), and is not really sanely extensible to anything beyond the core toolchain. If we were able to open the next distroseries for real before releasing the previous one, then we could (for example) usefully get the initial mass sync from Debian in place in advance. The current approach wouldn't scale to that kind of thing.

I would still like to be able to upload directly to the next distroseries along and bring the ancestry up to date incrementally. If there are unexposed facilities for this in Launchpad, I'm happy to assess them given pointers.