I while ago I created an issue related to another issue regarding a problem with an the use of an older version of paket. The reply from the maintainer was this:
@halcwb Sorry, I kind of lost motivation for various reasons. Nobody volunteered yet to take over. And to be honest some people prefer the “the build as a project && dotnet run” approach which doesn’t have issues like these and might be a way out of this as I guess you are not volunteering to take over.
And I really understand the problem from the maintainers perspective. Also, I had to admit that I am really no real programmer at all, but a pediatric intensivist, very enthousiastic using F#.
Moreover, I feel that there is a bigger underlying problem, i.e. there are more extremely usefull and beautiful libraries that have a similar problem. They are created by some very smart people, but those people move on. Another example is the FSharp.Formatting library. First created by Thomas Petricek, but then left afloat for a lot of years, while being used by many other libraries like ProjectScaffold which suffered a similar fate. Therefore, this problem can even cascade through multiple projects.
So, I have to admit, I am not part of a solution, but I do experience the problem. Also, I think this can be quite an existential threat to F# as a language. There should be an overall organisation that can supply the necessary every day task of maintaining the really core libraries for F#. Microsoft, are you listening?
Interested to know other views on this.