[Tex/LaTex] Is the tabu package obsolete

obsoletetabu

When I stumbled upon tabu some time ago it looked quite interesting on a first glance and I intended to learn more about it when I have the time.
But, in the comments section of this question posted on the new german question and answer site texwelt.de Herbert Voß wrote that the tabu package is obsolete in its current version (thereby citing the package author) and is not actively maintained anymore.
What are the implications for the usability of the package?
Should I refrain from investing time to learn tabu and consider some other packages for the creation of tables instead?

Best Answer

Update January 2019

Due to issues of tabu with recent changes in the LaTeX kernel, maintenance of the package has been taken up by a working group at tabu-fixed/tabu.

The aim of the working group is to fix the issues. Further development of the package is not planned at the moment.

Update July 2022

A possible modern alternative could be tabularray which was introduced in 2021.

Original answer

In a thread on comp.text.tex the author of tabu stated that bug fixes to the current version (2.8) of tabu will not be taken under consideration:

Well, to be honest, the time of bug reports will come with the next release.

See Incompatibility between verbatim and tabu? (Danger of using \scantokens in a package) for the motivation of Bruno Le Floch's question.

I asked back

So you're telling that the current version of tabu is completely unmaintained?

The answer was

In three letters, with no ligature: yes!

To make the story short, here's an excerpt from a subsequent message (the first line is my question):

So old documents written with the previous commands of tabu will cease to work? Wonderful.

I don't care. I want to built tabulars without any measurement or guess, with a maximum of features and a powerful interface.

The conclusions I can draw is that using tabu in its current version is dangerous, because its author has announced incompatible changes for the next version. And he doesn't care if people using his package are thrown under the bus.

Related Question