Folks,
Wine 1.8 is released, congratulations to everybody!
The development branch is now open for business, you can resend patches that had been deferred. However, I expect that things will be slow in the next couple of weeks, since many developers are leaving on vacation. I won't be around a whole lot myself either, so it may take a while before we are caught up. I will try to make a 1.9.0 release this Friday.
Michael Stefaniuc is now in charge of maintaining the 1.8 stable branch. Please see http://wiki.winehq.org/StableRules for details.
Happy holidays!