SeaDAS 7 is a big job, and it isn't like you can ignore SeaDAS 6.x while you concentrate 7.  I hope there will be ways for the user community to contribute (without making to big a drain on your time).   I assume that some advance preparation on the part of users will be useful.  Do you have any advice to help us prepare for SeaDAS 7.  Would it be useful to study any of the BEAM tutorials <http://www.brockmann-consult.de/cms/web/beam/tutorials> if we have not already done so?   If we want to create a build system, should we start with BEAM or go directly to the SeaDAS fork?  

With SeaDAS there are often many ways to accomplish a given task. I expect some (e.g. that rely on mapped HDF files) will not easily migrate to SeaDAS 7, while other approaches are better aligned with SeaDAS 7 capabilities.   I also expect that SeaDAS 7 will make it easy to do things that were barely possible with SeaDAS 6.  An example is categorical values such as Longhurst's regions.   Using SeaDAS to display maps of Longhurst regions encounters difficulties as the display rescales from 0-255 down to 0-190 or so with the result that two different categories often map to the same color.   It could be helpful when discussing seadas scripts in the forums to see comments of the form: "this approach uses features that will not be supported in SeaDAS 7", "this task would be much easier in SeaDAS 7", or "this approach will also work (with minor changes) in SeaDAS 7".