I'd like to start the gears turning on the process that will eventually spit out a new 7.8 release. /.../
That didn't stir up a lot of dust here, but it's still good news. I hope you're getting the help you need.
Finally, you should take this message as notice of an impending change freeze on the 7.8 tree. /.../
Unfortunately there's some risk that Roxen will take its usual liberties and go about its business in the pike source anyway: We have a customer project with a glue module against a SAML 2.0 client library (ZXID) and it's still fairly immature. I think we can keep the hacking inside that module though, so it can just be disabled in the official builds for now. I.e. we'll add a --with(out)-zxid config option and make --without-zxid the default.
The concept of external module building still hasn't taken root in the Roxen build systems... :\