1. Do not perform any changes before verifying with the current maintainer (yes that is me) if they are OK
2. Before the mere idea of a change shall cross your mind create a ticket in Jira and assign it to the current maintainer
3. Yes the current maintainer has also other obligations besides fixing things people break in the debian build files so be patient, it can sometimes take a bit for him to react.
4. This has been a lot of work so please stay away from fixing it to death