As of today, GitHub reports 311 commits on top of the current v0.9.6 and my understanding is that there is quite a number of implemented improvements just waiting to be released.
After fd0 announced a shift in his priorities some time ago I’ve lost track how the project is organized these days and who’s in charge of new releases. It would be great if you could share some thoughts on your plans with Restic and your estimate for an incremental v0.9.7/v0.10 release. Thanks!
We are currently working on an upcoming release. As you say there’s been a lot of improvement, and we’re all keen to get it out the door. You can rest assured that work is ongoing, not only to merge stuff but also towards a release.
The one in charge of releases is primarily @fd0 and although he’s not spending as much time on restic as he did e.g. a year ago, he still is working on it. It just doesn’t show as much because the work he’s doing is more backend and other less visible stuff, e.g. infrastructure. But he’s totally still around 
On a general note there’s more things than usual to finish around restic itself and to coordinate in general for this upcoming release, so it’s taking more time than with earlier releases.
You’re right that the next one will be 0.10.0 as it looks now 
Anyway, there’s no need to worry about it, there will be a release as soon as we can get it all wrapped up.
Meanwhile, I think everyone should feel assured that they can use the latest master build, I would definitely consider it stable enough for production use. Others may differ and of course it’s individual and relative to use case and environment, but for e.g. home use and personally I run the master build in production for a bunch of client backups. I’d say go for it if you need some of the implemented changes that hasn’t been released yet.
Regarding estimate I feel I shouldn’t give one. We want to release when we think it’s ready, so giving you an estimate is not something I think would be very practical.
May I ask if there’s anything in particular that’s been merged and you’re waiting for, or that you are having trouble with that lead you to asking about this? I’m just curious.
I’m still there, just not so active and visible these days
Before a new release can happen, I need to finish some tooling to create the releases.
Thanks for your exhaustive response, @rawtaz, much appreciated! It’s really great to see the project is still alive and kicking! There was no particular reason/feature I had in mind, I was just hoping to get a feeling for where we are as well as express my interest in all the cool stuff you guys have been working on in the past few months! Thanks for everyone who has contributed so far!
Thanks a lot for your encouragement
Oh yeah, I’m very grateful for all the work the maintainers and contributors do! And most of it does not depend on me having time in this very odd times!