Nope, I hadn't heard of it, but then I don't read these forums much.

I'm not sure it would have done much for me though. Hosting isn't a problem for me, and having my own APT repository allows me to cause as much mayhem as I like in my own sandbox. Mostly what I did was hack out the guts of dependency packages until whatever was stopping them compiling was removed and I could move on. The resulting .debs are not fit for end-user use, so I wouldn't want to see them anywhere near repository.maemo.org.

However, it would be marvellous if someone would re-do the worst packages in mud, using my packages to avoid dependency hell. Stuff like the libsasl2/libldap2 circular dependency, or ghostscript. That would make life a lot easier for people who want to get some really useful packages built without needing to rebuild the world.