Thank you, Robot101... that seems to be why. The rest of what you said is also accurate. Full screen mode is possible though unintuitive, but makes hitting the options screen impossible -- trying launches the WM window selector instead. Similarly, all the unclosable dialogs I've encountered so far can be closed -- but only by, say, hitting the options screen button (just tapping off the dialog moves the map in the background.)

It needs a lot more work, and I am not sure I have the know-how to do it. Very sorry to everyone who tried the packages and had their systems break... I tried locally, again, in scratchbox and on my device, but since the first think I do is always to install bash and make it my defualt shell, I never even thought to test it sans-bash. Anyway, I just committed a repackaged version that uses sh instead, but I'm not sure if that will be enough to fix mtjioe and markusm's issues or anyone who managed to install in it spite of that, but without bash.