How-To: Politely ask after seemingly-abandoned package

[idalton@ferret.phonewave.net]

I seem to be pretty bad about asking people things in the wrong way,
so...

It would appear that gcc-m68k-linux is abandoned. There are several
outstanding bugs between six months and two years old against the
package, and to my knowledge it hasn't been maintained since Slink was
frozen.

I would like to ask for maintainership, on the assumption that the
current maintainer (Martin Mitchell <martin@debian.org>) is no longer
actively maintaining it. The package does have a serious policy
violation (depending on a package which no longer exists - bug #77060)
and at least two other bugs which I have encountered during local use
and have (I believe) correctly fixed.

I actually USE this package (although changing its nature to a sparc
cross-compiler) and have an interest in fixing it.

But I just seem to be unable to ask something like this without coming
across as being rude..

-- Ferret