Backporting fixes to STABLE-BRANCH-1-4

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

A lot of good bug-fixes and minor improvments have landed on the 2.0
and 2.1 branches recently, but several of those fixes haven't made it
to the 1.4 branch.

The patch series that follows is my attempt to port the relevant
changes from the 2.0 series to STABLE-BRANCH-1-4.

I've left the git commit messages alone for the most part, just added
my own Signed-off-by line and a note that this was a backport to 1.4.

Please let me know if there are any issues with this series, its
presentation, or its approach.

Hope this is helpful,

        --dkg