Porting portage to Ubuntu?

[John McCabe-Dansted]

I was wondering if anyone had seriously considered porting portage to
ubuntu. Apparently portage can be used as a secondary package manager,
that does not have to manage every dependency of portage managed
packages. See e.g.
  http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/contribute/?part=1&chap=5

An ex-Gentoo user mentioned the possibility
  http://www.jordswart.org/archives/58
but thought it was too much work for him. However I think that this
would be useful to most Ubuntu users, not just ex-Gentoo'ers.
Sometimes you just have to install from source: you need a particular
version, or a developer asks you to test whether a bug is fixed in
CVS. I can easily spend a day downloading and installing dependencies
when I try to install stuff from source. I understand that porting
portage could mean that installing software from source would require
no more user intervention than synaptic, which would be really cool :)

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted
PhD Student
University of Western Australia