I am another maintainer, but was given maintainer rights specifically to support a new feature that I added.

What should I do? People are still raising new issues and Pull Requests, but I’ve been reluctant to make major changes as I’m not comfortable just forging ahead making changes without the main maintainer's approval because 1. it's his repo and 2. he asked me to support the feature I added, not to be responsible for, and sweeping changes to the whole gem.

I've already emailed the original creator of the gem, and someone else listed as a maintainer for the project that I've never interacted with, and doesn't seem to have been involved recently either.

I really need some advice or suggestions. What do you think I should do?

Some options I can think of: 1. do nothing and let the project languish 2. make the changes I see fit to his official repo, including merging Pull Requests etc 3. make a fork and make the changes there, accepting that most people won't get the new changes 4. as 3, but update the Rubygems.org listing for the project to point to my new fork 5. something else???