Update for nmbug, round 2

[david at tethera.net]

This obsoletes 

     id:1360374019-20988-1-git-send-email-david at tethera.net

This less broken than the last version ;). I've used these patches for
a few days without ill effects. The first two patches use
batch-tagging, which should have some speedup. The includes fixes for
the issue about quoting that Tomi raised.

The second two patches are a style improvement and a bug fix for a bug
that probably not many people hit.