Still, when someone offers their help there really is no need
to play a smart ass as you did. The only thing you might achieve doing
that is a) direct rebuttals (my e-mail) and b) mild propositions to
build patched packages yourself.
Admittedly I didn't read the email as properly as I should have, and he did add the relevant emoticon, so no worries.
Rolling your own is remarkably easy. Someone suggested this "gist", which I didn't use, but it gave me the info for the patches:
I then made a lenny chroot, noticed it already had all the patches up to 39, so I downloaded 40 thru 54, copied the dpatch shell stuff at the top of the existing patches to each of the new ones, added them to the relevant variable in debian/rules, and built the package. Built cleanly no problem.
I actually forgot to update debian/changelog, so my package are sort of rubbish anyway.