Please Release Me

[JakeQZ]

It has become almost impossible to backport changes to the 8.x branch.

We need to make an 8.9 release with the deprecations and bugfixes.

Then immediately a 9.0 release.

We then shift planned tasks to the next iteration.

I have tried to backport #1292, but ran in to problems that I'd rather not spend time sorting out. The changing of variable names away from Hungarian notatation makes diffing and merging a complete nightmare.