Ok, last call:

Is there still somebody around in the cairo community who is willing and able to make a release ?

I can roll a 1.18 tarball if that is what it takes, and I can put it in the same place as GTK releases

(on download.gnome.org), but I cannot upload it to the usual place for cairo releases (on freedesktop.org).

If I do that, though, the NEWS file in that tarball will come with a big note that cairo is dead, and advise

users to look for alternatives. The current situation is untenable.