I find myself with less time to hack lately and I'm trying to reduce the number of libraries I maintain so I can invest time in new things. Would anyone be interested taking over maintenance of network-uri?

It should not be much work at all. Bump a few dependencies and fix a bug or two. The package is very widely used so I suggest that the new maintainer should avoid breaking changes whenever possible*.

* In other words, if you want to completely rethink network URI handling, this package is probably not the place for it.

-- Johan