Comment 7 for bug 1171875

I've picked the signed-off versions from Pasi's branch and Bill's release note update into master and rel_2_4. There are structural changes between 2.3 and 2.4 that are blocking simple backports, so because this is a feature-y bug fix I'm leaving it out of 2.3. However, if someone wants to work on the changes for 2.3 backport, be my guest.

Thanks, Bill for developing and Pasi for testing!