Nick Wellnhofer, the long-time maintainer of the widely used XML parsing library libxml2, has announced he is stepping down from the role (no reasons are given for his decision), which means the project is effectively unmaintained going forward.
“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.“
It’s worth noting that he has been a key figure in libxml2’s development for more than a decade. Wellnhofer started contributing regularly around 2013 and, by 2015, had taken on maintainer responsibilities.
And before you say, “So what, it’s just a library,” let me say this: even though libxml2 is not something most end users touch directly, it is a critical, fundamental component for the open source ecosystem and for software development in general. It’s the official XML C library developed for the GNOME project, which provides APIs to parse, validate, and manipulate XML and HTML documents.
But what’s more important, libxml2 is a dependency for countless desktop and server applications—GNOME, KDE, browsers, office suites, mail clients, databases, and many system tools. In fact, almost every Linux distribution ships libxml2 by default because so many other packages rely on it. Think of it as one of these “glue” libraries that hold much of the Linux software ecosystem together. You get the picture.
What’s interesting here is that his announcement to step away from the project coincided with the release of the new libxml2 v2.15. Wellnhofer confirmed that he will continue to provide fixes for regressions for this version, but only until the end of 2025. After that point, no ongoing development or maintenance has been promised.
At this point, no new maintainer has been named, and the future of libxml2 remains open. Of course, nobody thinks such a critical piece can just be left hanging, and it’s only a matter of time before someone new steps in to take over. In the meantime, all we can do is thank Wellnhofer for more than a decade of dedicated work.
