Nick Wellnhofer has removed himself from the list of libxml2 maintainers and officially retired. Nick initially announced his resignation as maintainer in September, but until now, his intentions had been purely verbal. Following Nick's departure, Daniel Garcia Moreno (SUSE employee and openSUSE project contributor) and Iván Chavero (founder of NorTK and former Red Hat employee who worked on OpenStack and OpenShift platforms) announced their intention to take up the libxml2 maintainer mantle. They are not listed as previous libxml2 contributors. A few hours ago, these developers were added to the maintainer list, and the discussion regarding the project's unmaintained status was closed as a resolved issue.
Nick Welnhofer contributed to libxml2 development since 2016, was added to the maintainer list in 2022, and has remained virtually the only active developer since then. The libxml2 library is used in operating systems and products from Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Open-source packages that include libxml2 as a dependency include GNOME, Xfce, Mate, Cinnamon, Budgie, LibreOffice, Epiphany, libvirt, BIND, VirtualBox, lldb, Flatpak, Evolution, clang-tools, xsltproc, PostgreSQL, Pacemaker, Apache httpd, Zypper, and Scribus.
Maintenance issues and Nick's idiosyncratic approach to vulnerability fixing were among the reasons behind Google's decision to end support for XSLT in Chromium. In June, Nick abandoned his special approach to vulnerability fixing, treating libxml2 vulnerabilities as regular bugs to be addressed as time permits. Nick also criticized companies' additional requirements for uncompensated volunteer maintainers.
Source: opennet.ru
