Release channels take 2

This RFC describes changes to the Rust release process, primarily the division of Rust's time-based releases into 'release channels', following the 'release train' model used by e.g. Firefox and Chrome; as well as 'feature staging', which enables the continued development of experimental language features and libraries APIs while providing strong stability guarantees in stable releases.

This revision includes a significant simplification by merging stability attributes with feature gates, which further enables some additional useful features within Cargo related to version detection. One big implication of this change is that stability attributes are no longer suitable for use outside of std (if such a feature is desirable it is intended to be solved by Cargo).
How bad would it be to just always get the minimum version manually? The downside is that authors might be too conservative and just use the version they happen to use, rather than the minimum version.