Comment 14 for bug 162426

Using debconf for this might be an overkill though, this will for instance break translations and since the Debian developer do not seem to be very active for this package I don't think this is a good idea.
There is a new upstream which seems quite active (2.16.1 has just been released) so I think it could make sense to patch this as proposed and wait for Debian to re-activate to implement this properly through debconf.
In this respect it would also be good to issue a bug in the Debian BTS to alert them about this issue as well as to the fact that there is a new upstream release.