[Users] Merging Carpet's pmoesta/staggered

During today's telecon we realized that Carpet's branch "pmoesta/staggered" should be merged into the master branch.

Prior to doing so, could you (the maintainers of pmoesta/staggered) merge Carpet's master branch into the staggered branch, resolve the conflicts, and test that everything still works fine? Afterwards, merging pmoesta/staggered into the master will be trivial. This moves the burden of merging to the branch, where it is less disruptive, and where one can break down the merging into multiple commits, and test without time pressure.

-erik