Hello Steve, I do understand your concern about the time_t structure change and I also admit that there are some room of improvement how the syslog-ng package manage the library versioned dependency, but this is not the solution.
Based on https://wiki.debian.org/NonMaintainerUpload, the binNMU should be careful with the upload to not make the package uninstallable (You have to make sure that your binary-only NMU doesn't render the package uninstallable. This could happen when a source package generates arch- dependent and arch-independent packages that have inter-dependencies generated using dpkg's substitution variable $(Source-Version).) there are also explicit requirements for the package maintainers, to prevent this, by exactly doing the opposite of what the patch suggest (https://wiki.debian.org/binNMU, declaring dependency between an arch: all to an arch: any package: Depends: foo (>= ${source:Version}), foo (<< ${source:Version}.1~)) Please forgive my ignorance if it is already discussed somewhere, but it does not seems to be wise to go against the current official policy, just because of one change.