If I can pose a question to the more experienced in the audience: what are the best relatively-modern tools for exploring stats about a set of packages from the Debian archive?
I feel like this ought to be relatively straightforward, but between all the various QA and build subdomains, I'm finding the Step Zero a little obtuse. All I mean is like, e.g., if I want to grab metadata about the font packages (package formats, last-update dates, copyright fields, licenses, maybe file lists), or a subset of them, to sift through locally, what are my options for doing that directly in $POPULAR_LANGUAGE_OF_THE_MOMENT?
The only real wrinkle is that I'm interested in potentially comparing across releases, so simply scraping apt and dkpg for myself won't (I think) cut it.... I am interested in font packages, of course, which is why I'm asking on this list specifically — in case someone who had dealt with the old Font Review service or a similar effort had advice to share.
All advice is more than welcome, of course.
Thanks,
Nate