override the actual command used
   with the mergetool.$name.cmd configuration variable even for built-in
   mergetool backends.

 * "git rebase -i" learned the "--edit-todo" option to open an editor
   to edit the instruction sheet.


Foreign Interface

 * "git svn" has been updated to work with SVN 1.7.

 * "git p4" learned the "--conflicts" option to specify what to do when
   encountering a conflict during "p4 submit".


Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.

 * Git ships with a fall-back regexp implementation for platforms with
   buggy regexp library, but it was easy for people to keep using their
   platform regexp by mistake.  A new test has been added to check this.

 * The "check-docs" build target has been updated and greatly
   simplified.

 * The test suite is run under MALLOC_CHECK_ when running with a glibc
   that supports the feature.

 * The documentation in the TeXinfo format was using indented output
   for materials meant to be examples that are better typeset in
   monospace.

 * Compatibility wrapper around some mkdir(2) implementations that
   reject parameters with trailing slash has been introduced.

 * Compatibility wrapper for systems that lack usable setitimer() has
   been added.

 * The option parsing of "git checkout" had error checking, dwim and
   defaulting missing options, all mixed in the code, and issuing an
   appropriate error message with useful context was getting harder.
   The code has been reorganized to allow giving a proper diagnosis
   when the user says "git checkout -b -t foo bar" (e.g. "-t" is not a
   good name for a branch).

 * Many internal uses of a "git merge-base" equivalent were only to see
   if one commit fast-forwards to the other, which did not need the
   full set of merge bases to be computed. They have been updated to
   use less expensive checks.

 * The heuristics to detect and silently convert latin1 to utf8 when
   we were told to use utf-8 in the log message has been transplanted
   from "mailinfo" to "commit" and "commit-tree".

 * Messages given by "git <subcommand> -h" from many subcommands have
   been marked for translation.


Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.


Fixes since v1.7.12
-------------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.12 in the
maintenance track are contained in this release (see release notes
to them for details).

 * The attribute system may be asked for a path that itself or its
   leading directories no longer exists in the working tree, and it is
   fine if we cannot open .gitattribute file in such a case.  Failure
   to open per-directory .gitattributes with error status other than
   ENOENT and ENOTDIR should be diagnosed, but it wasn't.

 * When looking for $HOME/.gitconfig etc., it is OK if we cannot read
   them because they do not exist, but we did not diagnose existing
   files that we cannot read.

 * When "git am" is fed an input that has multiple "Content-type: ..."
   header, it did not grok charset= attribute correctly.

 * "git am" mishandled a patch attached as application/octet-stream
   (e.g. not text/*); Content-Transfer-Encoding (e.g. base64) was not
   honored correctly.

 * "git blame MAKEFILE" run in a history that has "Makefile" but not
   "MAKEFILE" should say "No such file MAKEFILE in HEAD", but got
   confused on a case insensitive filesystem and failed to do so.

 * Even during a conflicted merge, "git blame $path" always meant to
   blame uncommitted changes to the "working tree" version; make it
   more useful by showing cleanly merged parts as coming from the other
   branch that is being merged.

 * It was unclear in the documentation for "git blame" that it is
   unnecessary for users to use the "--follow" option.

 * Output from "git branch -v" contains "(no branch)" that could be
   localized, but the code to align it along with the names of
   branches was counting in bytes, not in display columns.

 * "git cherry-pick A C B" used to replay changes