Hi Axel, you can also upload straight away on unstable, because I met last year David, and he told me that he doesn't mind if the package is kept alive :)
He is overbusy in real life job, but he would avoid seeing the package die (and seems that somebody else is already contributing upstream). Since in collab-maint there is a new upstream release packaged, I would even try to upload that one (it is basically translation updates). But well, maybe in a future NMU upload :) cheers, Gianfranco (and thanks for cc'ing me because I was asking Salvo to include the patch in the collab-maint version and start from there)
