libserdes has been abandoned. Now what?

[morrone]

It looks like Confluent's libserdes library has been abandoned. The libserdes repository hasn't really seen any real code updates in three years. In the latest Confluent build repos for CentOS/RHEL 9, they no longer package libserdes. Likewise, they appear to no longer package avro-c and avro-cpp.

In the short term, those of us that need it will need to start packaging libserdes ourselves. avro-c and acro-cpp come from Apach Avro, so it is possible that someone is already packing those for RHEL9 or similar.

Longer term, perhaps we should consider moving away from libserdes. Either that or we may find ourselves maintaining libserdes.