I think it makes sense to promote 1.6 to release status and create a 1.7 dev branch before merging.
This seems reasonable. I might try to slip a few other things into 1.6.
So, I owe everyone an apology
. When I posted that back in May, I thought I'd do a few more quick and easy things in 1.6 (for example, adding some functions to
improve ILC support) ... and they turned out to be less quick and easy and I procrastinated instead of either doing them or giving up.
Rather than continuing to do that, or trying to rush some additional changes, my inclination is to release 1.6 essentially as is. So unless there are objections, I'll declare 1.6 release candidate status with the aim of releasing it in a week or two.
