in case you're not reading the front page of drupal.org frequently...
http://drupal.org/node/94000 New release system for Drupal contributions now deployed!
the part all of you definitely need to read: http://drupal.org/node/94000#developers Along with the new release system, there have been a lot of updates and changes to the Drupal CVS repository this year. Because of these changes, all CVS account holders and project maintainers should review the updated CVS and Project documentation even if they think they are already familiar with CVS. The handbook outlines the policies and procedures to use going forward for maintaining your projects[1], managing your releases[2] and proper branching and tagging[3] of your contribution on Drupal.org. More people using the same processes means there will be more people to help others and this will standardize our release process for the future.
Be sure to review the new version number documentation[4] so you will know how to properly take advantage of the release system for your modules and themes.
If you are unfamiliar with CVS branches and tags, please read the updated CVS introduction[5] to these concepts. There is also a new Maintainer quick-start guide[6] to help people new to CVS get up to speed on the basics of using Drupal's contributions repository[7].
[1] http://drupal.org/handbook/cvs/projects
[2] http://drupal.org/handbook/cvs/releases
[3] http://drupal.org/node/93999
[4] http://drupal.org/handbook/version-info#contrib
[5] http://drupal.org/handbook/cvs/introduction
[6] http://drupal.org/node/94179
[7] http://drupal.org/node/321
also, for those who happened to be around for the "fun":
"Update: Apologies for the delay in bringing drupal.org back up. In spite of many painless conversions on scratch.drupal.org, as feared, something went terribly wrong during the update on drupal.org. It took us a few hours to work around the problems this caused with some creative coding and sneaky SQL tricks. Immediately after the site was up, it experienced about an hour of very sluggish response time. This was due to a major SQL load put on the database server during the conversion itself (a huge backlog of queries the mysqld was struggling to process), the flood of traffic from bringing the site back on-line, and some lingering PHP configuration issues that we had setup to try to debug the faulty steps of the upgrade. The good news is that the site is back now, it seems to be as responsive as ever, no actual harm was done, and the new release system is working..."