Gary is taking over! In a good way.

[Mark Doliner]

Hi! I'm Mark Doliner. You may remember me from such commit messages as
"Mr. Ben Ice is probably wondering why he's mentioned in our codebase"
and "Fix this inconsequential compile warning."

The Pidgin project has always had someone designated as the
"maintainer." This person usually got decided upon by informal
discussion amongst the active developers when the previous maintainer
decided it was time to move on. It's nice to have someone who has the
final say on project decisions, who can break ties when developers
disagree about things, who can be the contact person for a hosting
provider, etc.

My understanding is that I'm the person who was last announced as the
maintainer of Pidgin (in an email from Sean Egan a ridiculous number
of years ago). That's how I used to think of myself, anyway. But I
haven't contributed anything useful to the Pidgin project in a
shameful number of years and I don't see that changing.

Gary Kramlich (grim) is interested in taking over, he's motivated
right now to get some things done, and my understanding is that most
other long-time devs are in favor of him being project lead. You
probably know where I'm going with this: Gary will be taking over as
maintainer/project lead of Pidgin/Finch/libpurple.

And of course open source software is more than just one person!
Everyone should continue to feel empowered to make changes, fix bugs,
triage trac tickets, take part in discussions on mailing lists and the
devel XMPP conference, etc. This project is what you make it. There's
an endless amount of work to do. I hope everyone continues to express
their opinions. It's important for open source software to be the best
ideas from many people. Consensus isn't always possible, but majority
is usually pretty good.

Also, sorry I didn't formally hand off my responsibility sooner! I
really should have. I hope I didn't contribute to our slow momentum
over the past few years _too_ much :-(

Also, could someone move my name from the Active Developers list to
the Retired list in the relevant places? I still use and love this
product, but I think it's good for the list of developers to reflect
reality.

Also, I'm still around on the Internet and what not. If anyone needs
access to something and you think I can help, please don't hesitate to
reach out. Email to mark at kingant.net and XMPP IM to
mark.doliner at gmail.com are the best ways to contact me.

Thanks!
--Mark Doliner