Ok. My knowledge of how Debian does things is rather limited (I don't use Debian), so I emailed the most obvious contact. In FreeBSD committers are allowed to touch each other's code, so I assumed that anyone here would be able to fix the problem. :-)
Unfortuantly we here at Debian don't trust each other that much. (Actually, any developer could NMU a new version but people hate to step on each other's toes. We have enough flamewars already.)
I'll resend my original email to the maintainer. Thanks, Colin Percival