treatment are now reported to the end user, so that the
   result in them can be eyeballed with extra care.

 * The output from "diff/log --stat" used to always allocate 4 columns
   to show the number of modified lines, but not anymore.

 * "git difftool" learned the "--dir-diff" option to spawn external
   diff tools that can compare two directory hierarchies at a time
   after populating two temporary directories, instead of running an
   instance of the external tool once per a file pair.

 * The "fmt-merge-msg" command learned to list the primary contributors
   involved in the side topic you are merging in a comment in the merge
   commit template.

 * "git rebase" learned to optionally keep commits that do not
   introduce any change in the original history.

 * "git push --recurse-submodules" learned to optionally look into the
   histories of submodules bound to the superproject and push them
   out.

 * A 'snapshot' request to "gitweb" honors If-Modified-Since: header,
   based on the commit date.

 * "gitweb" learned to highlight the patch it outputs even more.

Foreign Interface

 * "git svn" used to die with unwanted SIGPIPE when talking with an HTTP
   server that uses keep-alive.

 * "git svn" learned to use platform specific authentication
   providers, e.g. gnome-keyring, kwallet, etc.

 * "git p4" has been moved out of the contrib/ area and has seen more
   work on importing labels as tags from (and exporting tags as labels
   to) p4.

Performance and Internal Implementation (please report possible regressions)

 * Bash completion script (in contrib/) have been cleaned up to make
   future work on it simpler.

 * An experimental "version 4" format of the index file has been
   introduced to reduce on-disk footprint and I/O overhead.

 * "git archive" learned to produce its output without reading the
   blob object it writes out in memory in its entirety.

 * "git index-pack" that runs when fetching or pushing objects to
   complete the packfile on the receiving end learned to use multiple
   threads to do its job when available.

 * The code to compute hash values for lines used by the internal diff
   engine was optimized on little-endian machines, using the same
   trick the kernel folks came up with.

 * "git apply" had some memory leaks plugged.

 * Setting up a revision traversal with many starting points was
   inefficient as these were placed in a date-order priority queue
   one-by-one.  Now they are collected in the queue unordered first,
   and sorted immediately before getting used.

 * More lower-level commands learned to use the streaming API to read
   from the object store without keeping everything in core.

 * The weighting parameters to suggestion command name typo have been
   tweaked, so that "git tags" will suggest "tag?" and not "stage?".

 * Because "sh" on the user's PATH may be utterly broken on some
   systems, run-command API now uses SHELL_PATH, not /bin/sh, when
   spawning an external command (not applicable to Windows port).

 * The API to iterate over the refs/ hierarchy has been tweaked to
   allow walking only a subset of it more efficiently.

Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.


Fixes since v1.7.10
-------------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.10 in the maintenance
releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).

 * "git submodule init" used to report "registered for path ..."
   even for submodules that were registered earlier.
   (cherry-pick c1c259e jl/submodule-report-new-path-once later to maint).

 * "git diff --stat" used to fully count a binary file with modified
   execution bits whose contents is unmodified, which was not quite
   right.