Nick Wellnhofer announced his departure from the libxml2 library maintainership. Nick had been involved in the development of libxml2 since 2016, was added to the maintainers in 2022, and had been practically the only active developer since then. With Nick's departure, the project is left without maintenance.
The libxml2 library is used in the operating systems and products of companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Among the open-source packages that mention libxml2 as a dependency are GNOME, Xfce, Mate, Cinnamon, Budgie, LibreOffice, Epiphany, libvirt, BIND, VirtualBox, lldb, Flatpak, Evolution, clang-tools, xsltproc, PostgreSQL, Pacemaker, Apache httpd, Zypper, Scribus.
In June, Nick Wellnhofer stepped down as the maintainer of the libxslt library and declined to prioritize vulnerability fixes — he began treating vulnerabilities in libxml2 as regular bugs to be addressed as time allowed. Nick also criticized companies for imposing additional requirements on volunteer maintainers who work without compensation.
Before announcing his departure, Nick published the release of libxml2 2.15.0 and promised to fix any regressions in it by the end of the year. In the new version, bindings for Python and Schematron are disabled by default. Reading compressed data in the parser is now only possible if the XML_PARSE_UNZIP option is specified. The HTML serialization code and character encoding handling have been aligned with the HTML5 specification. The generation of API documentation using Doxygen has been implemented.
Source: opennet.ru
