- Patch #201122 by c960657, Moshe Weitzman: never write anonymous sessions, unless something has been written to . This is an important performance improvements -- as long as you use modules that use  carefully. It might be good to report some analytics about this in the performance settings page so administrators can see if there is a 'broken' module.

- Patch #310212 by justinrandell, catch, et all: killed  in _user hook, as well as two small kittens.

- Patch #302763 by Dave Reid, Rob Loach: replace time() by ['REQUEST_TIME'] as per Rasmus' suggestion.  Removed drupal_referrer() for consistency.

- Patch #252013 by Eaton, pwolanin, Susurrus et al: drupal_render() now printes #markup, not #value.

  et al.  Can you say 'registry'?  Drupal now maintains an internal registry of
  all functions or classes in the system, allowing it to lazy-load code files as
  needed (reducing the amount of code that must be parsed on each request). The
  list of included files is cached per menu callback for subsequent loading by
  the menu router. This way, a given page request will have all the code it needs
  but little else, minimizing time spent parsing unneeded code.

- Patch #245115 by kkaefer, John Morahan, JohnAlbin et al: after a long discussion we've decided to make the concatenation operator consistent with the other operators.

- Patch #181578 by Moshe: removed distributed authentication code from user_save().  Factored the relevant code out to a separate function.

#216022 reported by johnnysxip, patch by walkah: (SA-2008-016) OpenID - Incorrect claimed_id returned for OpenID 2.0 and other minor OpenID 2.0 compliance fixes

#196535 by sun, chx, dww: check whether Drupal can issue HTTP requests at all, so we know that this is the cause of problems, not the remote host not responding.

#200069 by keith.smith: new standard for 'more information' links in module help texts, as the handbook we referred to before was renamed

 - whitespaces at end of lines
 - indentation
 - control structure usage
 - whitespace in empty lines
 - phpdoc comment formatting

- Patch #163246 by keith smith, freso, O Govinda, catch, webchick et al: fixed minor spelling issues and fixed spacing issues.

#186658 by fajerstarter: OpenID login usability fixes and JS cleanup, also makes OpenID login Konqueror compatible

#184461 by bradlis7 and keith.smith: 'fix' OpenID help text to use American English spelling (as observed to be used in Drupal elsewhere)

- Patch #172582 by webchick, gabor, eaton, kentbyte, tresler, alpritt et al: improved the OpenID help texts.

#172591 by HedgeMage: add help page for openid module with short description of what does the module offer

#154064 by pwolanin: get hook_help() up to speed to menu changes, allowing router path based lookups, and also full path argument lookup with a passed argument array

  Let this be the day where we help revolutionize the online society, and the
  way websites and web services interoperate.  Or something.