split unrelated changes out of keithp's privates rework

[Jamey Sharp]

Hi Keith!

I think the important parts of your devPrivates patches will be easier
to review if you rebase on these patches first. I stuck your
signed-off-by on them since they're all extracted from your patch-set,
although I resurrected one comment you deleted from privates.h. If
there's some better way to tag the commit messages to explain what just
happened here, feel free to use it. :-)

Jamey