I did manage to get them to compile, but I still find the dependency to this unmaintained package to be a little problematic. Do you know if there is interest if I can supply a patch to use another log library, or has log4cxx been chosen for a reason?

Why do you think log4cxx is unmaintained? It hasn't had a release for a while, but it's quite stable in our experience. log4cxx was the best option when first creating rosconsole ~2 years ago, and I haven't seen any new software that changes that (boost.log has potential, but is unproven and won't be available on most of our target platforms for years).

Josh