It has taken me a while to get around to it, but following an announcement in the Debian Developer news I decided to try out and then merge into my packaging work-flow the new “duck” command line tool.
A quick;
$duck -v
is all you need from inside your package’s directory to check that all the URL’s and email addresses quoted in your package are not broken.
As I am lazy and do as much packaging as I can in Ubuntu Trusty (14.04) so that I don’t have to fire up my sid VM, I found that duck is so new it is only in Utopic (to be 14.10) and I could not use it. Therefore I used the wonderful “requestbackport” and “backportpackage” to request a backport.
And before I had had time to make a cup of tea, Felix Geyer had uploaded it to trusty-backports!
Ross Gammon's Blog 