Hi,
We had same problem on other packages and have discussed sometimes ago.
- Releasing repositories form "other" people
- Add usb_cam to ROS Kinetic main repository
- https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/pull/14890#issue-226190621
Best/Ideal solution is to find other maintainer who take care of release, and according to the discussion above, if we can not find maintainer, the package should be disappeared from newer distro. But, I personally think that is not a good approach. I think velodyne package is worth continue using on kinetic, even if no-one volunteered to release this aver 3 years.
So currently we’re discussing the new way of solve this issue, having a team of “release-maintainer” who only take care of releasing software to new distro(, without judging if the device is actually works on new distro or not), and I believe @gbiggs is writing the draft of this procedure. So let’s wait for his update 