Some quick notes on status of 0.19 for release where I see things.
1. [r12550][1] should probably be backported if anything.
[1]: http://trac.common-lisp.net/armedbear/changeset/12550
2. [r12549][2] is probably mostly just cosmetic, but brings up questions of how well the Pathname use of :UNSPECIFIC should be.
[2]: http://trac.common-lisp.net/armedbear/changeset/12549
3. I'm still unhappy about the state of the Pathname support, but its a goal that should be postponed until 0.20, as the current implementation is no worse that what shipped in 0.18.1. Most notably, I think I really need to a) support URLs as Pathnames and b) allow all Pathnames to be arguments of OPEN which probably means subclassing Stream.java. And this is a whole lot of work, so postpone.
4. Disturbingly, I uncovered a [compiler stack inconsistency error][3] today in working on ASDF. I checked that this was *NOT* induced by the recent PROGV fix, and exists at least as far back at 0.18.1. So, it should not affect the decision to release unless we feel we should fix it before release.
[3]: http://trac.common-lisp.net/armedbear/ticket/89
So, if we're in a "lets get this thing out the door", just release what's on 0.19 (after updating the README).
If you want to backport [r12550], I think it should not affect any of the existing test results, but they should be re-run just to make sure. I probably won't have such time until tomorrow (Wednesday).