Tobias Dammers
Besides naming convention issues (which could be compensated for with lookup dictionaries; a brute-force solution, sure, but better than nothing), a bigger problem is that sometimes packages don't match 1:1 between distros, so one distro might just provide one monolithic foobar-dev package, while another might split it up into foobar-client-dev and foobar-server-dev, while yet another might provide more than one alternative.
TL;DR: I think if we could just get a list of required native packages, we'd be a long way.
Package naming/splitting/etc. is the one reason that working across distros is difficult. RPM/deb/etc. are trivial to convert between and most other incompatibilities have known solutions for working around (eg. look at any standalone app which offers a tar.gz). I've been down this route before, and it inevitably ends up checking individual filenames. Many RPMs depend on filenames rather than other RPMs. PackageKit tries to apply this in a more format-neutral way. It was a few years ago that I last looked, but the "just" is unwarranted since this is *the* difficult problem. Tools like alien and checkinstall can do the rest. Regards, Chris