We've made several procedural changes recently that should allow package developers to work on and release their packages without being blocked by core releases or the state of core HEAD. See the latest
instructions on how to do releases. If your package works with 5.0.x, and requires only other packages that also work with 5.0.x, you can release it at any time, regardless of HEAD and of the core release cycle. (One caveat - repository generation isn't automated yet - I need to set up a batch script to do that.)