At Open Source Watershed Scott Shawcroft is comparing 9 major GNU/Linux distributions for "package freshness" in several dimensions. He compares how software flows down from upstream (say the kernel team) to downstream (say Gentoo) across distributions. To do so there is package mapping in place. Surprise! :-) His current approach maps certain package names onto others and the rest to itself:

• foo3-dev -> foo3
• foo3-doc -> foo3
• foo3 -> NULL -> foo3

Like packagemap it also involves manual editing. We're at discussing collaboration details. Stay tuned.