I think we should backport patch and version bump here. This is an old enough codebase, surely there is some bugfixes worth shipping in the release.

Note that upstream calls for distros updating to 2.x on its homepage :

[October 21, 2018] This short note to encourage every package mainteners to update keepalived distro package. Most of current version shipped with major distro are stuck to 1.3.X release. Keepalived code present in git master branch must be considered as stable and futur proof. We do not backport bugfixes and extensions to previous release, dev circle is an allways forward release process. So you are strongly encouraged to upgrade to last 2.X release which provides extensive work, extensions and bugfixes

In our case it would also mean revamping the associated service module. Although it's not a highly complex service, it's probably best done by someone actually using it.

Re: new maintainer - Absolutely - I was asking around on IRC and andi- identified himself as a user of it at least.

A start would be to have a nixos test for it so we can easily see if we're breaking the module.

/cc @mbrgm, as I see several keepalived bumps from them.

I know almost nothing about it; for now I just picked the patch to stables. If "you" feel like it, add more.

It's quite some time since I used keepalived on NixOS... and back then, it was only in a test environment, no production usage. PR looks good to me... however, I currently don't have anything in place to properly test the behavior besides running the binary. As @risicle suggested, a NixOS test could prove quite valuable.