Hello,
There was no September release, but October will return to the (increasingly) usual monthly release cycle. The last two months were fairly active, so focusing on testing and fixing regressions since the last release would be great. I plan to release SLIME 2.10 next Sunday.
On a related note, swank-backend was renamed to swank/backend and backends now have their own swank/foo packages. I'm interested in knowing whether this breaks code out there and whether it'd be worthwhile to add temporary nicknames that would ease the migration. (Alas, searching for swank-backend on github yields lots and lots of people who commit copies of SLIME into their emacs configs...)
Cheers,