will now show the commit that
   would be merged if the command were "git pull".

 * "git add" learned to stream large files directly into a packfile
   instead of writing them into individual loose object files.

 * "git checkout -B <current branch> <elsewhere>" is a more intuitive
   way to spell "git reset --keep <elsewhere>".

 * "git checkout" and "git merge" learned "--no-overwrite-ignore" option
   to tell Git that untracked and ignored files are not expendable.

 * "git commit --amend" learned "--no-edit" option to say that the
   user is amending the tree being recorded, without updating the
   commit log message.

 * "git commit" and "git reset" re-learned the optimization to prime
   the cache-tree information in the index, which makes it faster to
   write a tree object out after the index entries are updated.

 * "git commit" detects and rejects an attempt to stuff NUL byte in
   the commit log message.

 * "git commit" learned "-S" to GPG-sign the commit; this can be shown
   with the "--show-signature" option to "git log".

 * fsck and prune are relatively lengthy operations that still go
   silent while making the end-user wait. They learned to give progress
   output like other slow operations.

 * The set of built-in function-header patterns for various languages
   knows MATLAB.

 * "git log --format='<format>'" learned new %g[nNeE] specifiers to
   show information from the reflog entries when walking the reflog
   (i.e. with "-g").

 * "git pull" can be used to fetch and merge an annotated/signed tag,
   instead of the tip of a topic branch. The GPG signature from the
   signed tag is recorded in the resulting merge commit for later
   auditing.

 * "git log" learned "--show-signature" option to show the signed tag
   that was merged that is embedded in the merge commit. It also can
   show the signature made on the commit with "git commit -S".

 * "git branch --edit-description" can be used to add descriptive text
   to explain what a topic branch is about.

 * "git fmt-merge-msg" learned to take the branch description into
   account when preparing a merge summary that "git merge" records
   when merging a local branch.

 * "git request-pull" has been updated to convey more information
   useful for integrators to decide if a topic is worth merging and
   what is pulled is indeed what the requestor asked to pull,
   including:

   - the tip of the branch being requested to be merged;
   - the branch description describing what the topic is about;
   - the contents of the annotated tag, when requesting to pull a tag.

 * "git pull" learned to notice 'pull.rebase' configuration variable,
   which serves as a global fallback for setting 'branch.<name>.rebase'
   configuration variable per branch.

 * "git tag" learned "--cleanup" option to control how the whitespaces
   and empty lines in tag message are cleaned up.

 * "gitweb" learned to show side-by-side diff.

Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.


Fixes since v1.7.8
------------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.8 in the maintenance
releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).