How to deal with unmaintained crates? (eg. yaml-rust)

Hi everybody,

Some context, In my day job, I'm working on a custom format that is based on yaml but extends it. We're still using C++, so we the used yaml-cpp as a base for our parser and it was great for that purpose. Playing with rust on Advent of Code lately I also got sent back to reality... Not having rust enums, match, great string handling, iterators when working with my AST was hard. So I wanted to try to implement the same parser in Rust as an example to my teammates of how great rust can be.

The first thing I did was to find the crate yaml-rust and it seems it isn't really maintained anymore. It has not been updated in a year and there's a lot of PR's and unresolved issues, the CI is broken... So here is my open ended question.

How should the community handle such a case? Just beginning a new project or a fork seems really sad and would look like stuff we see with npm. I think we should try to bring the repo back to life, but if the maintainer is not interested anymore (which can totally be understandable), we would need to find new people and manage to transfer the ownership of the project.

What are you guys take on this?

NB: This is not at all an attack or critic against the maintainer of yaml-rust, it just happens to be an example I ran into! We all have lives and sometimes we move on.