+ * Various codepaths in the core-ish part learned to work on an
+ arbitrary in-core index structure, not necessarily the default
+ instance "the_index".
+ (merge b3c7eef9b0 nd/the-index later to maint).
+
+ * Code clean-up in the internal machinery used by "git status" and
+ "git commit --dry-run".
+ (merge 73ba5d78b4 ss/wt-status-committable later to maint).
+
+ * Some environment variables that control the runtime options of Git
+ used during tests are getting renamed for consistency.
+ (merge 4231d1ba99 bp/rename-test-env-var later to maint).
+
+ * A new extension to the index file has been introduced, which allows
+ the index file to be read in parallel for performance.
+
+ * The oidset API was built on top of the oidmap API which in turn is
+ on the hashmap API. Replace the implementation to build on top of
+ the khash API and gain performance.
+
+ * Over some transports, fetching objects with an exact commit object
+ name can be done without first seeing the ref advertisements. The
+ code has been optimized to exploit this.
+
+ * In a partial clone that will lazily be hydrated from the
+ originating repository, we generally want to avoid "does this
+ object exist (locally)?" on objects that we deliberately omitted
+ when we created the clone. The cache-tree codepath (which is used
+ to write a tree object out of the index) however insisted that the
+ object exists, even for paths that are outside of the partial
+ checkout area. The code has been updated to avoid such a check.
+