Merge branch 'maint'

Two fixes that have been cooking in for-maint for a while.

* maint:
  i9e: Restore file status flags on exit.
  NEWS,md: Add introductory text for v0.5.7.

diff --cc NEWS.md
index d9326db76cfa80b50a8a268fef1b29f966cdeb09,6cb098c56adae3ce61ca39ce8b73d2a81ef6c7c4..2056f90c06716f40f67fa43d477e63787e780ddb
--- 1/NEWS.md
--- 2/NEWS.md
+++ b/NEWS.md
@@@ -1,9 -1,14 +1,14 @@@
  NEWS
  ====
  
 -------------------------------------------
 -0.5.7 (to be announced) "semantic density"
 -------------------------------------------
 +-------------------------------------
 +0.5.7 (2016-12-31) "semantic density"
 +-------------------------------------
+ 
+ Mostly a bug fix release, and a bunch of internal improvements.
+ The only user-visible changes are the sanity checks for the touch
+ command and the new options to the ls command.
+ 
  - Speedup of the base64 decoder.
  - One of the two source browsers has been removed from the web pages.
    The doxygen API reference still contains an HTML version of each