I've run out of steam right now.. but we should be able to freeze the branch and send the release notices out mid/late morning today.
Source formatting and organise imports have been done. The only thing that remains is to put GPL3 copyright boilerplate on all files that currently do not have it, and then do a search and replace on the $$Year$$ and $$Version$$ strings in the release 2.9 branch with the appropriate values.
I might get it done before I come in, or I might stay sleeping for a bit longer.
j.