About the porting and the pain: I believe the hard parts are defining the metadata, and refining the actual program logic. In my experience over the last decade, 'synaptic' has been the most trouble-free system to use.

I think it would be less work to clone/port the needed logic bits to Windows/whatever, and share most of the metadata defined for Debian/Ubuntu/etc, instead of redoing (and debugging) everything from scratch.