having trouble w/ git & rpm for 5.27 release

Hi,

I'm trying to pull together a 5.27 release and I ran into some problems.
I can't devote much time to this for the next few weeks so your help
will get us that much closer to a release. In fact if someone can take
over the git & rpm stuff entirely, that would be awesome.

(1) I created a branch-5_27 in git via git branch.
I see that git checkout -b is recommended in various places.
Is the effect of git branch any different from git checkout -b ?

(1a) The only commit on branch-5_27 is to change the version
number in configure.in to 5.27.0. If it makes things simpler,
I'd be happy to nuke the branch and re-do the commit, it's no
big deal.

(2) I tagged 5.27.0 via git tag -a 5.27.0 and I can git checkout
that tag. However, git tells me I'm in a "detached head" state.
How did that happen? and what, if anything, should I do about it?

(3) rpmbuild compiles Maxima successfully but then when it is
trying to build the rpms, there is a long list of "installed but
unpackaged" files -- at first glance it looks like all the files that
are supposed to be in rpms. I suppose this menas rpmbuild is
confused about directory names or something. Can someone
investigate that?

thanks for any info,

Robert Dodier