If a forking-like feature could be offered on nuget.org and related tools then it would go a long way to help the community. It would permit anyone to propose and supply fixes to a package & users to decide to use a particular fork of a package or not. In the ideal scenario, the package project has a public repo that can be forked and the fix can be submitted with a pull request to the owner(s). However, in the case where packages have been abandoned or owner(s) gone dormant, a person interested in making fixes can also publish an interim solution for the community. The download statistics could be used to give some insight into if a particular package fork is getting more popular than the original. I think this could be done without a lot of work by simply using a package Id convention. For example, if a package has an Id of
foo and someone publishes a package with Id foo$profile then the latter could appear as related to foo.