[jahewson]

I don't find it that hard to maintain forks with git, even ones in which thousands of lines of code have been changed locally.

My usual reason for having a fork is Solaris support, or removing code which I don't need for performance reasons, or replacing the CMake build system with something sane. These aren't the kinds of changes which many maintainers are willing to accept.

Another frustratingly common case is that the original maintainer has gone AWOL and I need to fix a few bugs and maybe add a couple of features, but I do not want to become the de facto maintainer of a public fork.