switch the default the built-in path to /usr/local/bin/perl on not
too ancient FreeBSD releases.
+ * "git status" learned to suggest "merge --abort" during a conflicted
+ merge, just like it already suggests "rebase --abort" during a
+ conflicted rebase.
+
+ * The .c/.h sources are marked as such in our .gitattributes file so
+ that "git diff -W" and friends would work better.
+
+ * Existing autoconf generated test for the need to link with pthread
+ library did not check all the functions from pthread libraries;
+ recent FreeBSD has some functions in libc but not others, and we
+ mistakenly thought linking with libc is enough when it is not.
+
+ * Allow http daemon tests in Travis CI tests.
+
+ * Users of the parse_options_concat() API function need to allocate
+ extra slots in advance and fill them with OPT_END() when they want
+ to decide the set of supported options dynamically, which makes the
+ code error-prone and hard to read. This has been corrected by tweaking
+ the API to allocate and return a new copy of "struct option" array.
+
+ * The use of strbuf in "git rm" to build filename to remove was a bit
+ suboptimal, which has been fixed.
+
+ * "git commit --help" said "--no-verify" is only about skipping the
+ pre-commit hook, and failed to say that it also skipped the
+ commit-msg hook.
+
+ * "git merge" in Git v2.9 was taught to forbid merging an unrelated
+ lines of history by default, but that is exactly the kind of thing
+ the "--rejoin" mode of "git subtree" (in contrib/) wants to do.
+ "git subtree" has been taught to use the "--allow-unrelated-histories"
+ option to override the default.
+
+ * The build procedure for "git persistent-https" helper (in contrib/)
+ has been updated so that it can be built with more recent versions
+ of Go.
+
+ * There is an optimization used in "git diff $treeA $treeB" to borrow
+ an already checked-out copy in the working tree when it is known to
+ be the same as the blob being compared, expecting that open/mmap of
+ such a file is faster than reading it from the object store, which
+ involves inflating and applying delta. This however kicked in even
+ when the checked-out copy needs to go through the convert-to-git
+ conversion (including the clean filter), which defeats the whole
+ point of the optimization. The optimization has been disabled when
+ the conversion is necessary.
+
+ * "git -c grep.patternType=extended log --basic-regexp" misbehaved
+ because the internal API to access the grep machinery was not
+ designed well.
+
+ * Windows port was failing some tests in t4130, due to the lack of
+ inum in the returned values by its lstat(2) emulation.
+
+ * The characters in the label shown for tags/refs for commits in
+ "gitweb" output are now properly escaped for proper HTML output.
+
+ * FreeBSD can lie when asked mtime of a directory, which made the
+ untracked cache code to fall back to a slow-path, which in turn
+ caused tests in t7063 to fail because it wanted to verify the
+ behaviour of the fast-path.
+
+ * Squelch compiler warnings for netmalloc (in compat/) library.
+
+ * The API documentation for hashmap was unclear if hashmap_entry
+ can be safely discarded without any other consideration. State
+ that it is safe to do so.
+
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.