It is for the not-yet-implemented bridge community design.

This fixes a side-channel attack on the (fortunately unused!)
BridgePassword option for bridge authorities.  Fix for bug 5543;
bugfix on 0.2.0.14-alpha.

If you set ExitNodes so that only 1 exit node is accepted, the
previous patch would have made you unable to build circuits.

Previously, malformatted torrc values could crash us.

Patch by Esteban Manchado.  Fixes bug 5090; fix on 0.2.0.16-alpha.

This mitigates an attack proposed by wanoskarnet, in which all of a
client's bridges collude to restrict the exit nodes that the client
knows about.  Fixes bug 5343.

(cherry picked from commit fdbb9cdf)

in Makefile.am, we used it without quoting it, causing build failure if
your openssl/sed/sha1sum happened to live in a directory with a space in
it (very common on windows)

It was apparently getting mistaken for a problem, even though it was
at notice.

Fixes 5067; fix on 0.2.0.10-alpha.

This reverts commit 55e8cae8.

The conversation from irc:
> weasel: i had intended to leave torrc.sample.in alone in maint-0.2.2,
since i don't want to make all your stable users have to deal with
a torrc change. but nickm changed it. is it in fact the case that a
change in that file means a change in the deb?
<weasel> it means you'll prompt every single user who ever touched
their torrc
<weasel> and they will be asked if they like your new version better
than what they have right now
<weasel> so it's not great

Instead I changed the website to redirect requests for the tor-manual
URL listed in maint-0.2.2's torrc.sample.in so the link will still work.

There isn't really any point to messing with it. Resolves ticket 5005.

Bugfix on 0.2.2.29-beta; partial fix for 4533; found by wanoskarnet

Fixes bug 4856; bugfix on 0.0.6

This bug was introduced in 79fc5217, back in 2004.

he disagrees about what the code that we decided not to use would do