I am not sure I followed the necessary cvs tag work flow completely, but I'm sure you're discussed the details and the overview sounds good. Would this mean that we would get a packaging script for install profiles? We didn't discuss this in any depth, just the overview.
Absolutely not. Writing the packaging script for every install profile out there is a colossal task, it needs profile changes (I need Panels3...) too. We are talking of one install profile here, the Drupal core install profile. I have not looked at the code but surely Drupal is already special cased from contrib, it's another repo, different tag structure so it'd not be that big a change and once again, it's a change I am willing to contribute to. Once again, the way I imagine this, there would be a repository merged together from core and these core-contrib hybrid modules and you can check out from there. The fundamental difference between merely giving people commit access to specific parts of core is the ability for them to develop a DRUPAL-7--2 alongside the DRUPAL-8--1 version if they so want (and I believe they will want to). This makes it possible to have (some of the) aggregator features from D8 on a D7 install without having the whole site on D8. If the question is, but then why would anyone want to upgrade to D8, there will still be huge under the hood changes (DBTNG, registry) which you will want to have. NK