Mathieu here [0] announced a new tool in ubuntu-dev-tools to parse
ubuntu's update_excuses.yaml.
The goal is extremily similar to devscripts' grep-excuses, but it
accomplishes the work in a *much* nicer way.

I dare to propose to rewrite our grep-excuses to use the functionalities
provided by the python3 module ubuntu_archive_assistant that they wrote.

[0] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2018-September/040492.html

Well, my thought as I wrote the tool was to make it work with Debian
too, but I haven't had much luck doing some things outside of using the
Launchpad API... but there's also that I'm more familiar with that, so
maybe people have some tricks up their sleeve that I'm not aware of,
aside from using madison... I couldn't figure a way to grab Debian build
logs and results (which are useful when considering migration of
packages in Ubuntu anyway) aside from putting together the URLs, and
then you're at the mercy of these things changing.

To improve on this, we should also make it easier to parse excuses and
update_output.txt. I started a discussion about this at
https://github.com/Debian/britney2/issues/3.

I'll get started on a PR for the code changes I was thinking off on that
related aspect of things.

:)

there is an api.ftp-master.debian.org nowadays that *could* help with
getting information about packages' availability, besides madison (which
is also provided by said api since a few years).

there is a getbuildlog(1) in devscripts which does exactly that.  It
worked for more a decade now as buildd.d.o never changed, but yes, there
is no real stable API to access a build log URL.

Interesting indeed.  Thanks for the pointer!