How do the archives work?

[Matt Galvin]

Hi all,

I know this may be internal info, but I wondered if it would be
possible to get some insight into how the archives work in terms of
knowing when we will see updates and such. For example on the
hoary-changes list we can see that a new version of something was
accepted but it can be as much as 2-3 days before the package "hits
the acrhive". I understand things need to be tested and QA'd to some
extent before releasing it for community testing. But as we saw these
past few days, some packages did not get into the archive at the
expected time due to some "apparently" cyclic deps (i think i read
that somewhere), and many of us hit the issues with gamin, inotify,
and new kernel yesterday.

Anyhow, IMHO, I think knowing a little bit more about this process
would be nice to know, especially for those of us who are helping test
Hoary. (The wiki, http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/Archive doesn't
discuss this other than mostly listing mirrors and such)

Thanks in advance,

Matt