If you've been reading the internals list or the blogs of various PHP developers you probably know that the work on the new minor PHP branch, 5.3 has started now that the key feature list of the release has been established by a public vote on the internals list about a week ago. Some of those features, like namespaces, late static binding, __callStatic and several others have already made into the CVS.
As per our tradition of changing Release Masters for every minor release, a new masochist,
Johannes Schlüter will be taking of the role of RM for PHP 5.3 from me. I will continue to RM 5.2.X release, which has 1-2 releases in it still and will be actively maintained up until 5.3.0 is released into the wild, something that should happen early next year.
I've been release mastering PHP 5 for almost two years now, all the way back since 5.1.0 and it has been quite challenging and interesting time, and its time for new blood so to speak. I want to congratulate Johannes on his new role that will hopefully get confirmed on internals within the next few days and wish him the best of luck and ask all of the developers to cooperate with the new RM to make his task just a little bit easier.