Merge branch 'stable'
several fixes to path serialization for windows compatibility.  git config files uniformly use unix-style slashes; java's attempts to conform to platform variations are actually getting in the way here whenever we map from a File abstraction to a config key or value.
fix project name detection in the release-init command for windows.
switch some uses of a module's path property in gitconfig keys to use the handle property; in practice they're almost certainly the same, but semantically it's clear that this should be the handle.
additional fixes for forcing a consistent use of paths even in the face of windows, this time on the read side of things
also filter our perspective of submodule paths to use forward-slashes only at load time.  this should be a noop in most situations if we're only dealing with our own data, but git on windows does seem to allow use of escaped backslashes for paths, so we'll preemptively shield ourselves accordingly.
Merge branch 'master' into stable
update changelog to mark windows support.
release version v2.17.3