In December of 2007, it had been over 4 months since our prior patch release, 1.4.5, and I was getting impatient. The then-current release manager had moved on to other things, but I had some bug fixes that I wanted shipped. So, after reading the docs, and with quite a bit of hubris, I rolled a set of candidate tarballs and posted them for people to sign. It took me a few tries to get it right, but even though I'd only been hacking on the project for a year or two, I became the de facto release manager. 4 years, 26 releases, 2.5 children and 1 soon-to-be-PhD later, I'd like to start helping others learn the release manager role for our project.
I've got a few reasons for doing this, primary among them is increasing the bus factor. Also, in the last several months, I've written a lot of tooling and docs surrounding our release process. I'd like to give somebody relatively unfamiliar with that environment a chance to go through the process, to ensure all the required information is properly recorded. I'm happy to do some handholding as we go through. I don't plan on going anywhere, but having multiple folks able to cut and publish releases would make me feel much more comfortable in the unlikely event that I did. If you are interested, let me know. The key RM qualities are: responsiveness to the community, familiarity with the project guidelines, and the ability and patience to herd cats / push string / other metaphor here. This *isn't* a job application, and I'm not in the business of anointing a successor. Ultimately, the community will make the decisions, and whoever is willing to do the work will do the work. -Hyrum PS - Also, let me dispel any delusions of grandeur folks may have about the release manager role. My name goes on the release announcements, but really the role is more about the "manager" than the "release". I'm just a reflection of the community. -- uberSVN: Apache Subversion Made Easy http://www.uberSVN.com/
