There have been a few not-quite-serious-enough-to-justify-a-release
security fixes that, along with a couple of serious bugs, we think together
DO justify a new 0.8.* release.

So I just created a 0.8.4 branch, based on the 0.8.3 branch, and will be
cherry-picking from the master branch.

Planned changes from the 0.8.3 release:

Security-related:
42656ea  Make RPC password resistant to timing attacks
159bc48  Simplify storage of orphan transactions, fix CVE-2013-4627
37c6389  Performance optimization for bloom filters (help mitigate
potential DoS attack discussed last week)

Bug fixes:
9bf2a4ab  Fix multi-block reorg transaction resurrection
bf81a3ef  Fix Gnome bitcoin: URI handler
f0784ac4  Fix non-standard disconnected transactions causing mempool orphans
2461aba1  Mempool consistency check
pull 2916  Import OSX fsync change from LevelDB subtree  (will hopefully
fix the random-OSX leveldb corruption issues)

There are lots of little fixes that could be included, but those will wait
for the 0.9 release.

-- 
--
Gavin Andresen