mpm's transition

1. I'm going to slowly move on from Mercurial

Here it is 2016 and it's been almost 11 years since I started Mercurial. In that time, it's gone from a weekend and evenings side-project to a full-time job that still invades my evenings and weekends. It's about time for me to do other things.

So over the course of this year, I'm going to gradually remove myself from daily involvement in the project. As lots of people and companies have a lot invested in Mercurial, I'm doing this over a long period of time to make sure it goes smoothly.

There's a bunch of stuff that has to happen as part of transition:

• move all of the project infrastructure and assets fully within the project's control
• update the project bylaws and policies to be operational without a BDFL
• grow the project's steering committee with active, trusted community members
• do what I can to help people take review ownership of parts of the codebase normally left to me
• hand off all my day-to-day responsibilities like list management and sysadmin
• make sure all the miscellaneous details like domain registration and SSL certificates are covered

Many of these things are already in progress. As I start handing my various responsibilities off, I'm going to focus the balance of my time on actual Mercurial coding projects. I've currently set two goal dates:

• by July 1st, have at least one release (major or minor) made by someone selected by the steering committee
• by November 1st, be able to step away from daily involvement with the project without disruption

2. Frequently asked questions

• What are you going to do next?
  I have no idea. I'm not going to worry about it much before August or so.