Merge branch 'v7' into main

Some commits from the v7 branch have been published, and so I think it's
wise to include them in the history of 'main' rather than maintaining
two branches. This merge commit specifically ignores all changes made in
v7, which gives us the history without changing any files. In the future
we have the option of integrating the code behind these commits without
losing any of the `git blame` provenance metadata.