The maintainer of the libxml2 project announced he is stepping down from this widely-used open-source library without any replacement maintainer yet determined.
Nick Wellnhofer has long been the maintainer of libxml2, a widely-used library for parsing XML documents that has been around since 1999. Libxml2 is part of the GNOME project but used extensively by software across the spectrum and by no means limited to GNOME/GTK-aligned apps.
Wellnhofer announced a few months ago he would no longer honor any security embargoes around the project and treat any security reports just like other bug reports, given his constraints and being an unpaid volunteer. Now though he announced today he is stepping down as libxml2 maintainer.
Wellnhofer noted in his GNOME.org announcement:
“I’m stepping down as maintainer of libxml2 which means that this project is more or less unmaintained for now.
I will fix regressions in the 2.15 release until the end of 2025.”
We’ll see if/when anyone steps up to reliably maintain the libxml2 library for this widely-used but under appreciated software component.
