4 Stepping Down

With good fortune, you will continue maintaining your package for many decades. But sometimes for various reasons maintainers decide to step down.

If you’re the official maintainer of a GNU package and you decide to step down, please inform the GNU Project (maintainers@gnu.org). We need to know that the package no longer has a maintainer, so we can look for and appoint a new maintainer.

If you have an idea for who should take over, please tell maintainers@gnu.org your suggestion. The appointment of a new maintainer needs the GNU Project’s confirmation, but your judgment that a person is capable of doing the job will carry a lot of weight.

As your final act as maintainer, it would be helpful to set up or update the package under savannah.gnu.org (see Old Versions). This will make it much easier for the new maintainer to pick up where you left off and will ensure that the source tree is not misplaced if it takes us a while to find a new maintainer.