#340557 by Dave Cohen, Dave Reid, dropcube, smk-ka: speed up drupal_is_front_page() by caching its value instead of computing each time

#360023 by greggles, rszrama, stella, sun, andypost: add missing comment publish action and clean up some code documentation

#256001 by bjaspan, stormsweeper, Darren Oh: pgsql driver does not handle unsigned numeric fields properly

#566390 by Gábor Hojtsy, seutje, Jose Reyero: Apply locale import protection user setting to plural forms the same way we apply to other parts of the .po file

#265719 by kkaefer, JacobSingh, ksenzee, pivica: fix path mangling in CSS aggregation code to be sure to generate IE compatible CSS

#43462 by leafish_dylan, c960657, andypost: simplify and fix compatibility of compression code in page caching

#796048 by jbafford: if JS files are concatenated with a one line comment and a multiline comment, that can lead up to JS parse issues

#306611 by joshk, jbomb, sun, dereine, andypost: avoid calling nonexistent action callbacks (eg. when a module is disabled); also backport some documentation improvements

#523058 by catch, sun, c960657, smk-ka, pwolanin, andypost: optimize calls to check_plain() by trying to use new PHP 5 features and inlining UTF-8 checking

#320171 by Deve Reid, jbrauer: fix return value passing by reference in bootstrap.inc's IP address checking

#732064 follow up by pwolanin: move lock system loading earlier to avoid stepping over it or attempting to use it before it is loaded

#517642 by solipsist, lyrincz: db_field_set_default() omitted type check on default value, cauing problems for non-NULL fields

#591804 by rfay, merlinofchaos, sp3boy: theme preprocess functions in include files only run on theme registry rebuild for tpl.php files in themes

#358315 by neochief, Damien Tournoud, andypost: drupal_lookup_path() does not respect path alias ordering when older aliases are retained

#338630 by plach, arhak: locale module was unable to recover from a lost Javascript translation file

#251792 by pwolanin, Damien Tournoud, slantview, c960657: added a locking framework for long running operations; solves rebuilding issues with menus and the locale cache

#284392 follow up by benoitg, brianV, mathieu, evoltech, tyr, Steven Jones, agentrickard, bl444137: better fix for issues around SQL rewrites adding DISTINCT

#370958 by Rob Loach, drewish, c960657, neilnz: some Adobe Flash MIME types were missing from our MIME listing

#424372 by mr.baileys, bombatower, Arancaytar: :: in .info files caused fatal error, use list of constants for lookup instead

#639708 by kiamlaluno, JuliaKM, jhodgdon: minor fix for documentation of return value in drupal_match_path()

#644482 by hass (backport of #452936): use TRUNCATE to do full cache clearing, which results in a dramatic speed increase