What is relman, and what does it do?

Since the short description already sayed "frontend to and extender of pkgmake", you should first read what pkgmake is. Relman adds to this: It lets you define all your projects in a single configuration file with all their special settings they may require (e.g. the different source dirs, possible pre-run scripts and more). And it caters for the distribution of the resulting packages. This way you should end up with the only simple need to call relman <package> <version> to make a release - and when the script is finished, there's a tarball sent to sourceforge via FTP, another one via SCP to your web server, and the .deb/.[s]rpm files are added to the right repositories already. Well, sometimes you may need one run without distribution beforehand to check if everything's doing fine. That's just one more parameter to remember: relman <package> <version> -nodist …

For more details as well as instructions on installation, configuration and usage, please see the project wiki.