Nick Wellnhofer has removed himself from the list of maintainers for the libxml2 library and has officially stepped back from his duties. Initially, Nick announced his resignation from the maintainer position in September, but his intention had only been verbal until now. After Nick's departure, Daniel Garcia Moreno (an employee at SUSE and participant in the openSUSE project) and Iván Chavero (founder of NorTK and former Red Hat employee who worked on the OpenStack and OpenShift platforms) expressed their desire to take over maintainership, although they were not mentioned in the list of previous contributors to libxml2. A few hours ago, these developers were added to the list of maintainers, and the discussion about the project being without maintenance has been closed as a resolved issue.
Nick Wellnhofer has been involved in the development of libxml2 since 2016, was added to the maintainers list in 2022, and remained virtually the only active developer since then. The libxml2 library is used in operating systems and products from companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Among the open 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.
Issues with maintainership and Nick's unique approach to handling vulnerabilities were among the reasons for Google's decision to discontinue support for XSLT in Chromium. In June, Nick declined to prioritize fixing vulnerabilities—he came to view vulnerabilities in libxml2 as ordinary bugs to be addressed as time allowed. Nick also criticized companies for imposing additional requirements on volunteer maintainers working without compensation.
Source: opennet.ru
