Well, summer is here again and that means more Drupal development!  I am finishing up all of the small touches on my public/private files patch from last year's Google Summer of Code.  The development is going a lot more smoothly this time around for a number of reasons including:

1. It is now actually the time frame for submitting patches and features to Drupal 7, as opposed to last summer when I was working with an eternally broken HEAD revision in the run up to Drupal 6.
2. File uploads are not being broken every other day by some strange patch that was otherwise inconsequential.
3. My knowledge of Drupal and its inner workings has increased substantially.  The Forms API, menu system, etc. are actually making sense now.

So if everything goes relatively according to plan this should be going into Drupal 7.  I imagine that this will make a lot of people quite happy.  There are still a lot of other things to do to make file support sane in Drupal, but this is one more step on the way to enlightenment.