One of the most significant new LaTeX packages of recent years has been biblatex, originally developed by Philipp Lehman and offering an extremely powerful approach to bibliographies. As I’ve covered before, Philipp Lehman vanished from the TeX world a few years ago. To keep biblatex development going, a team was assembled led by Philip Kime. However, Philipp Lehman’s other packages have up to now been left unmaintained.
The LaTeX team are currently working on some LaTeX2e improvements, and they have a knock-on effect on Philipp Lehman’s etoolbox package. To date, it’s automatically loaded etex, but the team are moving that functionality to the LaTeX kernel so it will no longer be needed. Thus we needed to sort out a minor update to etoolbox. As I’m already involved with biblatex, it seemed natural for me to take up this challenge. I’ve therefore forked etoolbox (see The LPPL: ‘maintainer’ or ‘author-maintained’ for why it’s technically a fork), set up a GitHub site and made the changes. Of course, two days after that ‘one off’ fix I got my first bug report!
Philipp Lehman’s other big contribution along with biblatex and etoolbox is csquotes. While I don’t have any immediate need to make a change there, this seems like a good time for someone to pick it up too. So I’ve set up a (technical) fork and GitHub page for that too, and expect to have a few minor changes to make (I’ve had informal discussions about at least one). Should there be a need I’ll also be looking at Philipp’s other packages (he and I had interesting discussions about logreq, for example, and how the ideas might make it into expl3).