It feels to me like we're close to a 0.9 "feature freeze" / start of release cycle; I'd like to talk a little bit about what we'd like to see in the final 0.9 release.Payment Protocol support is ready to be pulled (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2539) . Unless there are major objections, I will pull it tomorrow (it has already gone through two rounds of bounty-driven QA testing, so I'm convinced it is ready).
I'd love for 0.9 to contain sipa's "headers first" initial block download optimization; I think it is a big enough improvement to justify making the 0.9 test/release cycle longer.
Coin control (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2343).The autotools work (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2805).Gitian-build with the latest openssl and Qt5. Perhaps update the version of Debian VMs that we gitian-build with.