Thanks for speaking up about this, Michel - I'm sure it wasn't easy to ask this kind of question! Appreciate the candor.
This "come on back" comment makes it sound like fabric-2 is being
abandoned and the development will now continue again on fabric-1. Is
that the case? So do we need to revert all our changes again we made
since 2018? What will happen with fabric-2?
Absolutely NOT the case! My intent here is just to acknowledge that the transition to v2 has gone longer than expected and offer a small (ideally, easily executed) olive branch to users still committed to v1 and for whom it is blocking their Python 3 transition, and to unify the fabric3 fork situation. It will also help out some folks working on transitional OS-level packages (which was the main genesis for the discussion).
I consider this an administrative/support level change; there will not be any major feature work on the v1 branch as a result of this. The back and forth on the list here is just the usual "stuff takes longer in a committee context" and shouldn't be taken as an indication of change of focus; my high level goal remains getting v2 feature complete.
Regarding that, as I've hinted at here, I am trying to get back onto the treadmill after some unexpected time off, and will be putting out a blog post this week on the topic.