Basically, the existing package maintainer doesn't want to maintain lilo anymore, says "will disappear by end of 2020"
But I have some hardware that update-grub just doesn't understand and a locally modified lilo that has support for it. Multiple attempts at fixing update-grub have resulted in merge-disaster every single update to the grub package and it's just not worth trying that anymore. I want to take over lilo maitenance so that apt-get update integration continues to work.