It would be cool to play with Smart Package Manager and ubuntu.

[de_lupus at pandora.be]

This looks pretty cool to look into since has some interresting features.
Maybe doing some benchmarks could be interresting.

>From http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=8999 :
The Smart Package Manager project has the ambitious objective of creating smart and portable algorithms for solving adequately the problem of managing software upgrading and installation. This tool works in all major distributions, and will bring notable advantages over native tools currently in use (APT, APT-RPM, YUM, URPMI, etc).

Building Smart
Dependencies
Core:	Smart is written in Python, with some core modules rewritten as C extensions for memory savings and performance gains. With that in mind, the core system of Smart depends on Python 2.3 or higher, and a C compiler to build the extensions.
Graphic Interface:
 	The graphic interface depends on pygtk 2.4 or higher.
RPM backend:	

The RPM backend depends on the Python rpm module of RPM 4.4 or higher, due to a limitation which was present in previous versions of the ts.dbMatch() method, and the availability of the readHeaderFromFD() function.

In the contrib/patches/ subdirectory there are patches for previous RPM versions including the missing functionality. There are also pre-packaged binary versions which include the patched module without requiring changes in other tools.
DPKG backend:	There are no extra dependencies besides DPKG itself.
Slackware backend:
 	There are no extra dependencies besides the packaging scripts installpkg, upgradepkg and removepkg.

read the full document here:
http://zorked.net/smart/doc/README.html

screenshots:
http://zorked.net/smart/

Haven't tested my self :) but looks promessing.

lupusBE (Kristof Vansant Belgium)