* "git describe --contains" often made a hard-to-justify choice of

tag to give name to a given commit, because it tried to come up

with a name with smallest number of hops from a tag, causing an old

commit whose close descendant that is recently tagged were not

described with respect to an old tag but with a newer tag. It did

not help that its computation of "hop" count was further tweaked to

penalize being on a side branch of a merge. The logic has been

updated to favor using the tag with the oldest tagger date, which

is a lot easier to explain to the end users: "We describe a commit

in terms of the (chronologically) oldest tag that contains the

commit."

* Running tests with '-x' option to trace the individual command

executions is a useful way to debug test scripts, but some tests

that capture the standard error stream and check what the command

said can be broken with the trace output mixed in. When running

our tests under "bash", however, we can redirect the trace output

to another file descriptor to keep the standard error of programs

being tested intact.

* "http.cookieFile" configuration variable clearly wants a pathname,

but we forgot to treat it as such by e.g. applying tilde expansion.

* When de-initialising all submodules, "git submodule deinit" gave a

faulty recommendation to use "git submodule deinit .", which would

result in a strange error message in a pathological corner case.

This has been corrected to suggest "submodule deinit --all" instead.