What stands between us and branching 1.7?

I'm sorry if I asked this before -- I've been asking individual folks for
over a month now, but I can't quickly find a public broadcast thread about
it, at least -- but I've been wondering lately:

  What, exactly, stands in the way of us branching for 1.7 stabilization?

ra_serf stabilization? No... that's fairly well taken care of, and would
fit perfectly within in the scope of post-branch work anyway.

WC-NG conflict storage? No... last I heard, we were going to ship with what
we have today.

WC-NG file externals? Maybe... but what remains to be done?

Optimizations and performance stuff? Sounds like stabilization to me.

Besides "the tests are passing", what -- if any -- acceptance criteria have
we established for this release to help guide us in this process? "Must not
regress performance-wise versus 1.6?" Something more? Something else?

This certainly doesn't inspire confidence:

   <cmpilato> so, i think i missed it -- or just forgot it over the long
              holiday break -- but ... where do we stand on branching for
              1.7?
   <peterS> that's the question everyone is asking each other. nobody
              seems to feel comfortable with the big picture knowledge to
              actually answer

-- 
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net>
CollabNet   <>   www.collab.net   <>   Distributed Development On Demand