What about soldier families? Will they claim and stay in a room or will they sleep in the same bed as the soldier (in the barracks)?[/b]
... how will this affect the soldiers' families? Will the soldier still claim a room while they are marked to sleep in the barracks?
... if the soldiers/guards are set to 'off duty' in the rotation, will they then go visit their families, sleep in their own rooms, make babies, etc?
... are the stands and racks going to count as owned items, and if so, are nobles going to get negative thoughts if some yokel in the armory has a better one than the noble does?
... will assigning more than one barracks (such as on different levels) confuse everyone?
We'll have to see on a lot of these, as we haven't worked out the details. For the last, you'll be able to have several places without trouble, as the squads will only accept one assignment each, I think.
Not sure whether you meant to repeat yourself, but those are some similar questions you previously asked. Toady might have some more concrete answers now.
I do not yet know precisely how Castes will work over all, but if there will be the option to have it such that only some castes are able to participate in a given job, I can see how this could really benefit some mods, particularly Kobold Camp
Doesn't sound like it, unfortunately:
The new entity position raws can specify castes. This would allow you to set up a matriarchy, for instance. Regular jobs can't at this point (they can have caste specific names). The caste occurrence is currently determined by the population ratios and isn't restricted other than that. As I work with the new underground features, this could be expanded as needed.
It's just a naming thing. I haven't done anything special or interesting in the caste vs. job direction yet. When I get to antmen for this release, that might very well change, but I'm not 100% sure what the outcome will be yet.
However, you can restrict entity positions by caste:
Everything noble/appointment related is going out into the raws. So you can have various properties, and if you want to unite all the responsibilities of the bookkeeper/manager/broker under one position you can do that, or change the names, or succession properties, caste restrictions, all that sort of thing. The main point for this time around was to add some structure to the military, as the current set-up of having any dwarf under any dwarf in weird nested squads is weird. These changes were especially required for strategy/army AI on the world map post-world gen, and that's necessary to get to improved sieges/sending out your own armies.
And presumably you can restrict an entity position to a particular profession as well (this would be necessary for the Dungeon Master, I think), so you could get a hackish approximation of caste-specific professions by creating a low-level entity position for each caste.