Removing lead maintainers

Dear Important People, ;-) Just wondering here... I'm in a situation with one of the packages that I took over (Numbers_Roman) where the previous lead (Sterling) is being bothered with bug reports, feature requests, and such like. While I recognize that it's polite and all that to keep someone in the loop, if they expressly don't want to be bothered by such things, it might not be bad to simply remove them from the package.xml and the site. Of course, their name is still in the file as an author, or whatever. That way they still get the credit -- and if they wish to come back and get involved again, I'd see no problem with that at all. There are, of course, situations in which this may be seen as especially negative. For example, if QA would "adopt" a package because the maintainer went missing, and the maintainer did not give permission to do anything. In that case, it would cause (at least) irritation, and we don't need it. But if someone says that they can't maintain their packages any more and gives them up for adoption, I think it would be fair (and kind) to remove the guy from the list of maintainers-- or at least create a new role: "former lead", which would give credit, but would prevent unnecessary emails to the guy. I've cc'd this to pear-dev and pear-qa for input, but I think that there should be a policy decision about this to prevent trouble from happening. Klaus