Some of the libraries packages are quite actively being looked at by people, and others...not so much. A common scenario for pull requests to libraries packages is that they languish, untouched, for ages. Is anyone looking at the pull requests that have been coming in for X11, to give one example?

My reaction to this scenario is that I subscribe to the notification stream and if pull requests come across that look relatively uncontroversial, I review and merge them, just to keep the peanuts rolling along. If, sometimes, like in this instance, we might have to go back and do a little bit of work to fix things up afterwards, because two steps forward and one back is better than nothing happening at all.

Of course, sometimes when you go and do this, someone is actually actively tending to the repository in question, in which case we need to get a reminder of this put in the project's README. In general, as you noted, releases have been a little bit of a free-for-all lately (that's what you get with conscript labor) and maybe every repo libraries@ maintains should either have a dedicated release person or release instructions for community contributors in the readme.