charm-tools releases going forward

[Marco Ceppi]

Hello everyone!

tl;dr: there's a new charm command coming for 16.04 which is a combination
of charm-tools (current charm command) and the charmstore-client (currently
charm2 command) projects. Some commands are being removed and a whole bunch
added to make the charming experience more...charming. A follow up [ANN] on
the release will be made when available for testing.

With the upcoming 16.04/Juju 2.0 release we're legitimizing what started as
a collection of example formulas[1] (that's right, the MySQL and WordPress
charms were started over 5 years ago![2]) that grew to be a collection of
bash scripts[3] and finally the charm command we know today.

In Xenial, in the coming weeks, charm-tools will be a supplementary package
to the new charm package. This new charm package provides an impressive set
of tools for charmers to push charms, resources, and terms to the store
faster; iterate and manage charm release processes; and a host of other
functions vital to everyday charm workflows.

With this new charm command a lot of charm-tool commands are being
deprecated[4]. Going forward only the following commands will be available
from the current charm command:

- add
- build
- create
- layers
- proof
- test

There are new commands being added, but if you're using a charm command
today that you don't see in that list please let me know. For those curious
`charm compose` & `charm generate` are now `charm build` and `charm
inspect` is `charm layers`.There will be a follow up announcement to this
list when an RC of the new charm/charm-tools will be available for
consumption.

For the past few years we've been pretty liberal with a "release whenever"
policy for charm-tools. This was great as there would be periods of time of
high activity and low activity[0] so as needed we would simply cut releases
as we saw fit.

However, going forward we'll be adoption a 6 month semantic release
process, much like Juju. Patches will be released as needed to address bugs
within charm-tools and we'll work to make sure those get into the archive.
Minor releases will occur every 6 months and we'll make alpha/beta releases
available for early adoption.

I'd like to take a moment to thank all the contributors to charm-tools thus
far[0], the Juju UI Engineering team for their work on making sure
charmstore-client and charm-tools works together effortlessly, and James
Page for helping to sort out packaging.

[0]: https://github.com/juju/charm-tools/graphs/contributors
[1]: https://github.com/juju/charm-tools/tree/b0a46
[2]: https://github.com/juju/charm-tools/compare/b0a46d5...cb5add
[3]: https://github.com/juju/charm-tools/tree/b5ee1
[4]: https://github.com/juju/charm-tools/issues/95

Thanks,
Marco Ceppi
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