Thjis: This is the right time to automatically search for RC bugs. So was a year ago. Although we want the RC bug count to drop, an RC bug is still an RC bug regardless of whether we know about it or not. And many RC bugs didn’t exist a year ago. Take for example #392121. A package name change in a build-dependency caused my package to FTBFS. This bug would not have existed a year ago, but needed to get fixed for etch.

Incidentally, when you go through a package rename for a development package, it would be nice to check what packages build-depend on the old package. A september changelog entry for cli-common says:

- Removed transition dependency for cli-common on cli-common-dev.

(7 month for a package rename transition should be more than enough)

However, at no point in that seven months did anyone email me or file a bug report to tell me that the name changed. This bug wasn’t caught until someone rebuilding the archive noticed.
Actually, this might be a good idea for an infrastructural change. Would it be possible to set up a script that notices when packages are removed and sends a notice to the maintainers of any packages build depending on them?