A changing of the guard has taken place with the launch of the new branch of PHP - 5.3. Ilia Alshanetsky is no longer the release manager, instead Johannes Schlüter will be taking the lead.

From Ilia:

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.

Ilia is stepping down after two years of service as release manager and, while sad to move on, is happy to see "new blood" move into the project to liven things up.

Check out Manfred Weber's comments on the change too.