It's very interesting this idea.
I'll play with my linux laptop and gphoto2 and my Canon camera and see what can be done with it.

To compile it, I would suggest you guys to add

to the sources.list in /etc/apt and run:

to update the list of packages.
After that you can simply run:

to get the debian source (ready to be packaged) of gphoto2.
After that to experiment with it just cd in the source directory and run:

and it will compile and create the deb file for you in the parent directory.
Of course this is likely to fail due to source dependecies and here comes the worst part. Going thru the dependencies, install and compile a dependency and figure out which one is useless on the tablet (for example gphoto2 depends on gpm and this is useless [I think] on our tablet).

After this boring work, you'll have a cool .deb file that will install cleanly on the tablet.

To be really clean you should edit the control file in the debian folder and remove the useless dependencies, update the Maintainer to yourself, remove any Uploaders entry (if any) and change the version of the package to reflect the fact it is for Maemo:

for example for the debian gphoto2 package:

as "2.4.0-1" is the debian version.
Any subsequent update should be done with:

Also remember to change the Section entry in the control file to a Maemo compatible one (like user/Tools).

This is only a short guide.
If you follow these hints and the ones present in the Maemo documentation pages, you will end up with a nicely packaged deb file ready to be uploaded to a public repository and that plays fair with other packages.

EDIT: of course, this in the scratchbox environment