Please extend the rmadison parser so it can add &f=json to the URL it fetches.
This avoids people post-processing text to get json out.

    01:08 <REDACTED1> TIL (from twb's comment earlier) "rmadison -u ubuntu" to find out package versions from ubuntu
    01:09 <REDACTED2> It's super slow. :-/
    01:11 <REDACTED3> And the output format differs
    01:11 <REDACTED1> REDACTED2: indeed
    01:12 <REDACTED3> so better not shell-parse that
    01:13 <REDACTED1> the output here only seems to differ by a leading space in front of the package name
    01:14 <REDACTED3> yes
    01:19 <REDACTED1> rmadison $pkg | sed 's/  \+/ /g' | jc --csv   goes a long way to parsing the output though :)
    01:19 <REDACTED3> TIL: jc
    01:20 <REDACTED2> TIL there's no python-is-python2 in Ubuntu 22.04.
    01:27 <REDACTED2> For me, "jc --csv" produces garbage on rmadison output.
    01:30 <REDACTED2> Like... it assumes that the first line is a header, and uses "6" (?!) as the column separator.
    01:30 <REDACTED1> oh hmm here (sid) it recognized the | as the separating character.  but I saw after posting that command that one would need to add a columns title line with echo for the json objects to make sense
    01:31 <REDACTED1> anyway .. like you were saying, it's not super trivial to parse.
    02:18 <twb> REDACTED1: I think this is probably easier: https://api.ftp-master.debian.org/madison?package=mg&f=json
    02:19 <twb> The args rmadison passes are all single-letter codes, file:///usr/bin/rmadison#lines=197-209

Example output:

    $ curl -s 'https://api.ftp-master.debian.org/madison?package=mg&f=json&a=source&s=testing' | jq .
    [
      {
        "mg": {
          "testing": {
            "20210609-1": {
              "component": "main",
              "architectures": [
                "source"
              ],
              "source": "mg",
              "source_version": "20210609-1"
            }
          }
        }
      }
    ]

Note that this does NOT work for Ubuntu.

    $ curl https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/madison.cgi?package=mg\&f=json
    <title>dak ls aka madison</title>
    ⋮
    <h2>dak ls mg</h2>
     mg | 20110905-1.1 | trusty/universe  | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, powerpc, ppc64el
     mg | 20160118-2   | xenial/universe  | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, powerpc, ppc64el, s390x
     mg | 20171014-1   | bionic/universe  | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, s390x
     mg | 20180927-1   | focal/universe   | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
     mg | 20200723-1   | impish/universe  | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
     mg | 20200723-1   | jammy/universe   | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
     mg | 20210609-1   | kinetic/universe | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
    ⋮
    Usage: dak ls [OPTION] PACKAGE[...]
    Display information about PACKAGE(s).

      -a, --architecture=ARCH    only show info for ARCH(s)
      -c, --component=COMPONENT  only show info for COMPONENT(s)
      -h, --help                 show this help and exit
      -r, --regex                treat PACKAGE as a regex <i>[not supported in madison.cgi]</i>
      -s, --suite=SUITE          only show info for this suite
      -S, --source-and-binary    show info for the binary children of source pkgs

    ARCH, COMPONENT and SUITE can be comma (or space) separated lists, e.g.
        --architecture=m68k,i386
    ⋮
--- /etc/devscripts.conf ---
Empty.

--- ~/.devscripts ---
BTS_CACHE=no
DEBCHANGE_RELEASE_HEURISTIC=changelog
DEB_BUILD_HARDENING=1
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=parallel=$(getconf _NPROCESSORS_ONLN || echo 1)