The bad news...
Ok, I bit my tongue through most of this process, because I didn't feel I knew the intricacies involved to comment intelligently, but now that its resolving itself it appears that this poor chap had nothing wrong but a busy few months, a broken e-mail address, and a little difficulty with English. Drupal-id deserves a bit in the way of apology - its a contrib module, not core, and he took it up when No one else would - it appears just to get CVS access to work on things his way - since no one else wanted too. Now that we've spent Many e-mails calling him a poor maintainer in public He's ACTIVELY SEEKING HELP - now its 'Bad News'? bad news?! Isn't this great news from this thread's perspective? Isn't this exactly what a busy 'responsible' module maintainer *should* do? I ask this in all seriousness as I'm thinking of applying to be a co-maintainer of a few 'highly-used' modules and if this is the treatment people who try to help get, I might reconsider. I'd rather be fully informed in advance though.