Dear Kip, thanks for your mail and references. I have asked ildar, in the bug you referred to, additional details on what broke in the last Gedit versions. If anybody is able to fix his fork, or produce another one and make some minimal commitment to update it (or accept contributions for it) over time, I will be happy to switch the Debian package to it.
The best thing would clearly be having an up to date fork owned by a project, rather than an individual who (legitimately) writes "I personally don't plan to maintain this regularly". I would be happy to be in such a project and occasionally contribute - while I would not want to simply package my personal fork. Pietro
