I was the maintainer of dpkg up until a few hours ago when an orphan request was submitted and accepted within an hour of submission.  There is supposed to be a 2 week period where the maintainer is contacted and a conversation can happen.  This procedure was not followed here.

  The package was not out of date, it is supposed to track upstream stable, not unstable!  bertptrs has updated it to the unstable version.  If he wanted the unstable version he could have created a dpkg-unstable package or otherwise modified the PKGBUILD for himself.

Thanks,

Ido