full hex
   object name.

 * "git rm $submodule" used to punt on removing a submodule working
   tree to avoid losing the repository embedded in it.  Because
   recent git uses a mechanism to separate the submodule repository
   from the submodule working tree, "git rm" learned to detect this
   case and removes the submodule working tree when it is safe to do so.

 * "git send-email" used to prompt for the sender address, even when
   the committer identity is well specified (e.g. via user.name and
   user.email configuration variables).  The command no longer gives
   this prompt when not necessary.

 * "git send-email" did not allow non-address garbage strings to
   appear after addresses on Cc: lines in the patch files (and when
   told to pick them up to find more recipients), e.g.

     Cc: Stable Kernel <stable@k.org> # for v3.2 and up

   The command now strips " # for v3.2 and up" part before adding the
   remainder of this line to the list of recipients.

 * "git submodule add" learned to add a new submodule at the same
   path as the path where an unrelated submodule was bound to in an
   existing revision via the "--name" option.

 * "git submodule sync" learned the "--recursive" option.

 * "diff.submodule" configuration variable can be used to give custom
   default value to the "git diff --submodule" option.

 * "git symbolic-ref" learned the "-d $symref" option to delete the
   named symbolic ref, which is more intuitive way to spell it than
   "update-ref -d --no-deref $symref".


Foreign Interface

 * "git cvsimport" can be told to record timezones (other than GMT)
   per-author via its author info file.

 * The remote helper interface to interact with subversion
   repositories (one of the GSoC 2012 projects) has been merged.

 * A new remote-helper interface for Mercurial has been added to
   contrib/remote-helpers.

 * The documentation for git(1) was pointing at a page at an external
   site for the list of authors that no longer existed.  The link has
   been updated to point at an alternative site.


Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.

 * Compilation on Cygwin with newer header files are supported now.

 * A couple of low-level implementation updates on MinGW.

 * The logic to generate the initial advertisement from "upload-pack"
   (i.e. what is invoked by "git fetch" on the other side of the
   connection) to list what refs are available in the repository has
   been optimized.

 * The logic to find set of attributes that match a given path has
   been optimized.

 * Use preloadindex in "git diff-index" and "git update-index", which
   has a nice speedup on systems with slow stat calls (and even on
   Linux).


Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.


Fixes since v1.8.0
------------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.0 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).

 * The configuration parser had an unnecessary hardcoded limit on
   variable names that was not checked consistently.

 * The "say" function in the test scaffolding incorrectly allowed
   "echo" to interpret "\a" as if it were a C-string asking for a
   BEL output.

 * "git mergetool" feeds /dev/null as a common ancestor when dealing
   with an add/add conflict, but