Preparation for 1.8 alpha

[Tim Rice]

Hey all,

I think we've now done most (all?) of the cleanup that seemed necessary for 
v1.8. I've submitted a request for ftp upload rights, and as soon as it's 
approved I plan to send up an alpha for testing.

Note that 1.8 is intended to be fairly conservative, so some requested features 
have been deferred to 2.0.

If there were any outstanding bugs which seem to have been overlooked in the recent 
flurry of Git commits, this is your chance to please remind me what they were before I 
"lock it in."

~ Tim