IMO one of the biggest problems of PHP is that maintainers tend to lose interest after some time.
An average author is very active in the beginning, then the extension gets stable (or even is included into the core) and then.. well.. it's not that fun anymore. Writing documentation is boring, fixing bugs on some weird and broken platform is tricky & difficult. Some people get real life - kids, family, real job etc.. Some people just don't do PHP or C anymore..
Extensions just become orphaned, even though they might be used by thousands of people.
Believe me, it's really sad to see those extensions being unmaintained for years.
I don't think it's possible to change the humans nature or the reasons stated above, so I'm currently more interested in finding new maintainers than in returning the old ones. Maybe adding maintainers names to the extension docs would encourage people to take over its maintainance?
I guess we also should create a list of extensions and their maintainers somewhere @ php.net (similar to the EXTENSIONS file), just to gather some attention to the extensions and their maintainers.
Btw, what happened to people.php.net? Did the idea die before even being born?
