In order to change the upstream version of a program someone has to be the author of it and make an official release.
Since, I just a user and the (hopefully the future) official maintainer I cannot do that.
Since, the project seems dead, I could try to adopt it upstream but I am not sure about the procedure needed to do so.
First I want to publish and test my new package (with all the fixes in place) and check that everything works.
Then I could try to see what could be done for the upstream situation.
As a bottom line, it is not a problem the fact that I cannot change the upstream version, the packages will have debian versions attached
In order to change the upstream version of a program someone has to be the author of it and make an official release.
Since, I just a user and the (hopefully the future) official maintainer I cannot do that.
Since, the project seems dead, I could try to adopt it upstream but I am not sure about the procedure needed to do so.
First I want to publish and test my new package (with all the fixes in place) and check that everything works.
Then I could try to see what could be done for the upstream situation.
As a bottom line, it is not a problem the fact that I cannot change the upstream version, the packages will have debian versions attached