With some handholding from Steve Langasek it is now finally done:
Apparently successful
final: -gnutls12,-libtasn1-2,
[...]
The old gnutls stuff (gnutls11, gnutls12, libtasn1-2) has been removed from
etch. It took
a little bit longer
than I originally thought but it happened before etch, which is the main
point. ;-)
There are not many lessons learned, I should have know before that it can take an unexpected amount of time to get stuff (re)built. A nice piece of information was the best way to ask for binary NMUs. The other thing is that it might be have been worthwile to upload a libgnutls11 without libgnutls11-dev at some point to stop people from (accidentally) building against the old crufty library. I ended up searching for these with grep-dctrl regularily.