Well, as you can see we’re unable to reach / hear from Rico, and it’s been more than a month since the first post in this thread. Not many people have volunteered to potentially be co-maintainers / mutual MR reviewers either.
Emmanuele suggested we escalate to the GNOME release team.
The normal solution is: whoever wants to maintain Vala adds themselves to the project’s doap, and everybody moves on. But in this case, Vala has locked down settings that prevent anybody from pushing commits or even merging merge requests. So you are indeed going to need to go to release team. Release team will need to ask infrastructure team to edit the project settings. And then you’ll be able to add yourself to the doap.
Cross-linking things: @bcorby has opened Vala project maintance (#1272) · Issues · GNOME / gnome-build-meta · GitLab