Cycle 1.7.6, day #7 of week #3

Getting closer to 1.7.5.2 to push out some accumulated changes.

Gave another look at the streaming write-out topic, shuffled and reshuffled the topic number of times and split out clean-ups and refactoring changes to existing parts of the system, to make the topic by itself smaller, and making it easier to review these preparation steps.

Sent out the result to the list, and then queued them in 'pu'.

Sent out the periodical "What's cooking" summary.

Reviewed and commented on 10 topics.

Queued 20 patches from 1 person.

Merged 8 topics to 'next' branch for public testing.
Merged 4 topics to 'maint' branch, to include in the maintenance release.