Librsvg wasn't maintained for years. We've received a huge amount of security bugs related to librsvg. Easily 10+ within a short timeframe. These weren't fixed because nobody was interested. The code itself is old and far from nice (from what I heard).
Federico volunteered to fix a few of these security bugs. This only resulted in people sending us even more security bugs. That required more time than Federico had. So again politely requesting for more assistance. Etc etc
Eventually Federico starts blogging about Rust, fixing super old but very visible bugs, etc. If you look at the announcement you'll notice how big just this one release is. He did way more.
Wikipedia relies on librsvg. The bugs were really hurting them. At one point it really seemed like maybe we'd better have a developer paid somehow to work on it.
Librsvg wasn't maintained for years. We've received a huge amount of security bugs related to librsvg. Easily 10+ within a short timeframe. These weren't fixed because nobody was interested. The code itself is old and far from nice (from what I heard).
Federico volunteered to fix a few of these security bugs. This only resulted in people sending us even more security bugs. That required more time than Federico had. So again politely requesting for more assistance. Etc etc
Eventually Federico starts blogging about Rust, fixing super old but very visible bugs, etc. If you look at the announcement you'll notice how big just this one release is. He did way more.
Wikipedia relies on librsvg. The bugs were really hurting them. At one point it really seemed like maybe we'd better have a developer paid somehow to work on it.
tldr: great effort by Federico.