that could be
   needed (including the ones that are not necessary for a specific
   task).

 * Project search in "gitweb" shows the substring that matched in the
   project name and description highlighted.

 * HTTP transport learned to authenticate with a proxy if needed.

 * A new script "diffall" is added to contrib/; it drives an
   external tool to perform a directory diff of two Git revisions
   in one go, unlike "difftool" that compares one file at a time.

Foreign Interface

 * Improved handling of views, labels and branches in "git-p4" (in contrib).

 * "git-p4" (in contrib) suffered from unnecessary merge conflicts when
   p4 expanded the embedded $RCS$-like keywords; it can be now told to
   unexpand them.

 * Some "git-svn" updates.

 * "vcs-svn"/"svn-fe" learned to read dumps with svn-deltas and
   support incremental imports.

 * "git difftool/mergetool" learned to drive DeltaWalker.

Performance

 * Unnecessary calls to parse_object() "git upload-pack" makes in
   response to "git fetch", have been eliminated, to help performance
   in repositories with excessive number of refs.

Internal Implementation (please report possible regressions)

 * Recursive call chains in "git index-pack" to deal with long delta
   chains have been flattened, to reduce the stack footprint.

 * Use of add_extra_ref() API is now gone, to make it possible to
   cleanly restructure the overall refs API.

 * The command line parser of "git pack-objects" now uses parse-options
   API.

 * The test suite supports the new "test_pause" helper function.

 * Parallel to the test suite, there is a beginning of performance
   benchmarking framework.

 * t/Makefile is adjusted to prevent newer versions of GNU make from
   running tests in seemingly random order.

 * The code to check if a path points at a file beyond a symbolic link
   has been restructured to be thread-safe.

 * When pruning directories that has become empty during "git prune"
   and "git prune-packed", call closedir() that iterates over a
   directory before rmdir() it.

Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.


Fixes since v1.7.9
------------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.9 in the maintenance
releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).

 * Build with NO_PERL_MAKEMAKER was broken and Git::I18N did not work
   with versions of Perl older than 5.8.3.
   (merge 5eb660e ab/perl-i18n later to maint).

 * "git tag -s" honored "gpg.program" configuration variable since
   1.7.9, but "git tag -v" and "git verify-tag" didn't.
   (merge a2c2506 az/verify-tag-use-gpg-config later to maint).

 * "configure" script learned to take "--with-sane-tool-path" from the
   command line to record SANE_TOOL_PATH (used to avoid broken platform
   tools in /usr/bin) in config.mak.autogen.  This may be useful for
   people on Solaris who have saner tools outside /usr/xpg[46]/bin.

 * zsh port of bash completion script needed another workaround.