> since the original author has announced his abandonment of the project inside the project itself
Except that doesn't mean what you think it means.
Marc Lehmann, the author of JSON::XS, believes that P5P, the de-facto leadership of Perl are incompetent and that recent versions of Perl added nothing but bugs and useless, incompatible changes. He went on to effectively fork the interpreter, and offers his own forked 5.022 version as his "stability branch".
So when he says "I simply can't keep up working around new bugs or gratituous incompatibilities", he means the (alleged) bugs and gratuituous incompatibilities in Perl itself, not his module. Whether you agree with him or not about the quality of recent versions and the state of the language in general is up to you - but his published modules remain supported, as in a very specific definition of "supported".
As for the request in your original node title - feel free to write one yourself. | 