cherrypicking our way to 2.16

[address@hidden]

Hey all,

Once the most recent critical issues are squashed, are people up for forking 
off a stable branch from 2.15? Administratively we'd go into cherrypick mode 
like we did for 2.13 where we institute a moratorium on pushing to the stable 
branch and have a cherrypick Czar (like Carl was a year-ish ago) port critical 
bugfixes to this branch. All release candidates would come from this branch.

Cheers,
MS