Debian package repository upgrade

[Matthew Wild]

Hi folks,

As some of you know we've been working on improving our packaging
"infrastructure", which hasn't really been touched since the project
was started!

We have just put the new Debian repository live this evening. We
believe we have tested everything necessary, and that the switch
should go largely unnoticed... but I wanted to notify everyone just in
case. If you see unexpected package upgrades or dependency issues,
please shout!

Most importantly... if you were using 'stable' in your apt
sources.list because your particular distribution wasn't available,
you can (and probably should) now update that (run lsb_release -sc to
find the correct name to replace it with).

A bit more about the changes for those interested:

Our old package builder (building both release and nightly packages)
has been stuck on an old version of Debian for some time. It was only
able to build for one target (lenny!), but by and large the resulting
packages have worked on multiple versions of Debian and Ubuntu.
However this was clearly not going to last forever :)

Our new builder is a more powerful virtual server on Amazon EC2, which
also means we can run it only when necessary (generally an hour a day
for nightly builds), which makes expected costs less than $2/month.

Combined with changes we have made to our build process we can now
target multiple distributions, including all current versions of
Debian and Ubuntu (except the just-released 'raring'... it's coming).
We are also working on producing Windows and OS X nightly builds for
the first time too.

Finally, we switched our repository manager from Falcon (very nice,
but buggy and unmaintained) to the more common and supported reprepro.
This means we can finally offer source packages, the lack of which was
a common frustration for people on uncommon architectures.

Many many thanks should go to Kim Alvefur, who tackled the largest
portion of the work of setting up the new system. Many thanks also to
Florian Thießen, who has very kindly sponsored the previous build
server for us all this time (by my calculations that's around 1000
package builds)!

Again, just let us know if you have any problems related to the switch
and we'll do our best to help.

Regards,
Matthew