Expose formatting of elapsed time as xolox#misc#timer#convert()
De-emphasize e-mail address, emphasize GitHub for feedback
Implement generalized rate limiting of CursorHold events
Functions to persist/recall Vim values from/to files
Generalized asynchronous Vim script evaluation (for vim-easytags)

The idea of forking Vim into the background to perform long running tasks
that would otherwise block the user's editing session originates from the
'async-cleanup' feature branch of vim-easytags, where I picked it up from
a tip by Inko Karkat (@inkarkat). Because I can see this being useful in
several of my Vim plug-ins I decided to generalize the concept and
implement it in vim-misc.

One thing that may not be immediately obvious from the commit is why I
implemented two ways for the results of asynchronous processes to feed
back into the main Vim process. The reason is twofold, both having to do
with Vim's client/server implementation:

 1) Reading through the pull request of the mentioned feature branch it
    looks like Vim's client/server support on Mac OS X is either missing
    or problematic.

 2) Running the 'async-cleanup' branch (which always used client/server
    communication) I saw several crashes on Linux. I have no proof but
    suspected the client/server communication to be the cause of this.

So now there's an alternative if the client/server mechanism starts to
act up (which it may very well do because it's a complex part of Vim).

See also the pull request for the mentioned feature branch:
  https://github.com/xolox/vim-easytags/pull/49
Support for querying/setting UNIX file permissions

To be used in the feature branch xolox/vim-easytags#async-take-two of
the vim-easytags plug-in (see also xolox/vim-easytags#84) in order to
preserve the permissions of tags files (as explained in the docs; it's a
good example of why this functionality is very useful to have on UNIX).
Support for 'atomic' file updates (preserving owner, group and mode)

To be used in the feature branch xolox/vim-easytags#async-take-two of
the vim-easytags plug-in (see also xolox/vim-easytags#84) in order to
preserve the permissions of tags files (as explained in the docs).
Bug fix: Don't raise exception if /usr/bin/stat doesn't work