Forking is a godsend for using patched versions of inactive user's repos. In my case, an owner of a library was inactive. I noticed other users had fixed issue

Forking is a godsend for using patched versions of inactive user's repos. In my case, an owner of a library was inactive. I noticed other users had fixed issues I was having, so I pointed my gem file at their repo temporarily until the owner of the root repo finally got back.