It was recently brought to my attention that Embedded Debian (Emdebian) is extensively using edos-debcheck for quality assurance purposes.

edos-debcheck is probably one of the most representative utilities of the whole EDOS toolchain: it can be fed with package lists (such as apt's Packages file, in the case of Debian) and asked to check whether some (or even all) packages have unsatisfiable dependencies. If this is the case, something is probably wrong with the distribution represented by the input package list, as it is distributing packages its user will never be able to install.

edos-debcheck is being used in Debian as well, but the use Emdebian is making of it is quite peculiar. Indeed the Emdebian people are using edos-debcheck before an actual upload of bunch of packages to ensure a priori that broken dependencies won't hit the Emdebian archive.

While this would be harder to achieve in Debian (as the uploader as less control on the upload chain, think for example at Packages stuck in NEW: the package universe can change sensibly between the moment they are uploaded and the moment they actually hit the archive), there is room for adding at least some warning at upload time.

Building on the Emdebian scripts, we are working on adding support for such additional checks to dput (the main upload utility used by Debian Developers), probably by the means of pluggable external hook.