evaluating blocking risk (or «packaging pressure») in package dependencies

[Patrice DUROUX <duroux.patrice@orange.fr>]

Dear Debian team,

I was thinking about the current Sid situation of jackd2 and libopus,
and I do not known if this was already discussed neither if there are
some (QA?) tools to address the following.

Is there a possibility to evaluate package dependency relation in terms
of, for instance:
- number of maintainers (or team),
- activity or frequency of changes,
- compliance with release goals such as multi-arch for instance,
for both members of a dependency couple to explicit «potential risk»
of blocking situations like the current with Sid jackd2 and libopus?

jackd2 is a team managed package and libopus is only one maintainer,
jackd2 is active and libopus is less active,
jackd2 is already multi-arch and libopus still not

This description is somehow schematic as some of the above terms are not
well-defined. But I was just trying to expose an idea.
Also, I did not look at the information present in UDD to see if it
contains all the data to define queries that may address such
evaluation.

Best regards,
Patrice