Libxml2 maintainer Nick Wellnhofer has recently announced his departure from the project. Nick has been involved in the development of Libxml2 since 2016 and has been one of the few active developers since then. With his departure, the project has been left without a maintainer, raising concerns about its future.
Earlier this year, Nick also stepped down from his role in overseeing the LibxSlt library, citing a lack of time to address vulnerabilities and criticizing companies for expecting volunteers to work without compensation. This has left major tech companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft, who rely on the Libxml2 library in their products, in a potentially vulnerable position.
The Libxml2 library is a crucial component in various operating systems and products, including Gnome, Libreoffice, Epiphany, and many others. Despite the importance of this library, the departure of Nick has left it in a precarious state.
Prior to his announcement, Nick had released Libxml2 version 2.15.0 and promised to address any regressions by the end of the year. The new version includes several changes, such as disabling default bindings for Python and Schematron languages, requiring the use of the XML_PARSE_UNZIP option for parsing compressed data, and aligning the HTML serialization code with HTML5 specifications. Additionally, documentation for the API is now generated using Doxygen tools.