Okay!
So you guys convinced me that we should make more of an effort to explain SLIME to people, since currently it's like "the world's worst kept secret." Based on Bill's thoughts I think we can make Brian somewhat happy without actually making release tarballs :-)
To this end I have done two drastic things: made a new webpage (with HTML-hacking help from #lisp) and posted an up-to-date description of SLIME to comp.lang.lisp. I have represented us as being "at version 0.13" (i.e. FAIRLY-STABLE is at the SLIME-0-13 tag), which I hope helps explain our current state in reasonably meaningful version-number terms.
Re: making a real release, I think that when we first discussed this the main things we needed were (in my mind):
Stable code (no awful bugs that force an upgrade within a few months) Clean code (our backend interface was a mess for a long time) Documentation Proper web page
I think we're now substantially closer to having releasable code, and we pretty much have a proper manual and web page. So although we haven't been planning how to make a release, I do think we've been moving steadily towards a release-worthy state all the same.
Cheers, Luke