Ryan, we're looking to start development within the next few weeks, with a view to completion in about 2 months.

I understand the difficulty of concurrent development of a 5 and 6 branch as you guys are still fixing bugs and I'd have to merge those back into the 6.x branch. Depending on how much you have to do, and how brutal the changes are, this could either be trivial (though tedious) or severe.

From the looks of cvs.drupal you guys do one commit per release?

I know this might be a stretch, but- if you released a beta in the next few weeks, and then started committing all your daily changes to CVS, I could merge them into the 6.x branch as we go?

The last thing I want to do is do this privately.

How far away from a beta are you?