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And yet Chris still thought he was fit to lead the group. Maybe in a project leadership role it's not all about how many commits you make?

Number of commits != overall impact on the language/community. I think he will serve this role just fine.

Which is good, since he will lead (and is a contributor, so at least knows the technical details) as opposed to being burdened with day to day coding?

The best project managers I worked with, didn't write one single line of code on the projects.

what about mailing lists? swift-evolution?