Can you talk about the experience of starting to maintain it and gain acceptance for new commits from debian upstream? I've got my eye on a few little pieces of software to start working on but am afraid to make the leap.
Seconded, I would be extremely interested to hear this due to some code I have been working on that has been effectively abandoned.
I've done this before, usually you just contact the upstream maintainer, get access to the project either from them or via the abandoned projects takeover process of the project hosting provider, make a new release and file a bug with the Debian maintainer documenting the new release and new maintainer.
Interesting. The original maintainer has not responded to me at all, so it sounds like I'll have to do the latter.