[RFC] should these two topics graduate to 'master' soon?

There are two topics that are marked as "Will cook in 'next'" for practically forever in the "What's cooking" reports. The world may have become ready for one or both of them, in which case we should do the merge not too late in the cycle.

* jc/merge-drop-old-syntax (2015-04-29) 1 commit

  This topic stops "git merge <message> HEAD <commit>" syntax that
  has been deprecated since October 2007 (and we have issued a
  warning message since around v2.5.0 when the ancient syntax was
  used).

* jk/no-looking-at-dotgit-outside-repo-final (2016-10-26) 1 commit

  This is the endgame of the topic to avoid blindly falling back to
  ".git" when the setup sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository.
  A corner case that happens to work right now may be broken by a call
  to die("BUG").

I am leaning toward including the former in the upcoming release, whose -rc0 is tentatively scheduled to happen on Apr 20th. I think the rest of the system is also ready for the latter (back when we merged it to 'next' and started cooking, there were still a few codepaths that triggered its die(), which have been fixed).

Opinions?