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.

My list:

Bug:  I'd really like to see the leveldb corruption issue (mostly on OSX, it seems) fixed. This is hard because it can't be reliably reproduced, and, at least on my machine, takes weeks to occur. Help needed to reproduce/fix, see https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/2770 for what we know about the problem.

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.

I plan on spending about half my time on code review and helping get pull requests tested, and the other half of my time working on code that probably won't make it into the 0.9 release.

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Gavin Andresen