* HTTP-based transports learned to propagate the error messages from

the webserver better to the client coming over the HTTP transport.

* The "core.preloadindex" configuration variable is by default

enabled, allowing modern platforms to take advantage of the

multiple cores they have.

* "git format-patch" learned --signature-file=<file> to take the mail

signature from.

* "git log" and friends now understand the value "auto" set to the

"log.decorate" configuration variable to enable the "--decorate"

option automatically when the output is sent to tty.

* "git replace" learned the "--edit" subcommand.

* Parts of the test scripts can be skipped by using a range notation,

e.g. "sh t1234-test.sh --run='1-4 6 8-'" to omit test piece 5 and 7

and run everything else.

* Reworded the error message given upon a failure to open an existing

loose object file due to e.g. permission issues; it was reported as

the object being corrupt, but that is not quite true.

(merge d6c8a05 jk/report-fail-to-read-objects-better later to maint).

* The "%<(10,trunc)%s" pretty format specifier in the log family of

commands is used to truncate the string to a given length (e.g. 10

in the example) with padding to column-align the output, but did

not take into account that number of bytes and number of display

columns are different.

(merge 7d50987 as/pretty-truncate later to maint).

* The "mailmap.file" configuration option did not support the tilde

expansion (i.e. ~user/path and ~/path).

(merge 9352fd5 ow/config-mailmap-pathname later to maint).

* The completion scripts (in contrib/) did not know about quite a few

options that are common between "git merge" and "git pull", and a

couple of options unique to "git merge".

(merge 8fee872 jk/complete-merge-pull later to maint).

* "git diff --find-copies-harder" sometimes pretended as if the mode

bits have changed for paths that are marked with assume-unchanged

bit.

(merge 5304810 jk/diff-files-assume-unchanged later to maint).

* "git format-patch" did not enforce the rule that the "--follow"

option from the log/diff family of commands must be used with

exactly one pathspec.

(merge dd63f16 jk/diff-follow-must-take-one-pathspec later to maint).

* "git gc --auto" was recently changed to run in the background to

give control back early to the end-user sitting in front of the

terminal, but it forgot that housekeeping involving reflogs should

be done without other processes competing for accesses to the refs.

(merge 62aad18 nd/daemonize-gc later to maint).

* "git pack-objects" unnecessarily copied the previous contents when

extending the hashtable, even though it will populate the table

from scratch anyway.

(merge fb79947 rs/pack-objects-no-unnecessary-realloc later to maint).

* "git remote rm" and "git remote prune" can involve removing many

refs at once, which is not a very efficient thing to do when very

many refs exist in the packed-refs file.

(merge e6bea66 jl/remote-rm-prune later to maint).

* The autostash mode of "git rebase -i" did not restore the dirty

working tree state if the user aborted the interactive rebase by

emptying the insn sheet.

(merge ddb5432 rr/rebase-autostash-fix later to maint).

* "git status" (and "git commit") behaved as if changes in a modified

submodule are not there if submodule.*.ignore configuration is set,

which was misleading. The configuration is only to unclutter diff

output during the course of development, and should not to hide

changes in the "status" output to cause the users forget to commit

them.

(merge c215d3d jl/status-added-submodule-is-never-ignored later to maint).