I'll get in touch with the Armel Debian guys and see if I can get some assistance converting their DEBs to IPKs.

I'm here to help, just tell me where to focus my attention. If there's any grunt work that needs to be done, manual labor, editing configs, typing tedium, or data entry. I'm your guy. I can work on that between calls.

I imagine the repo will exist mostly for the benefit of developers, and not end users. With a well stocked repo of -dev packages that are compiled to work with the current kernel, there's less risk in damaging the development environment and less work getting the fiddly bits that a programmer might need to get their application off the ground. Less time wasted if Developer A and Developer B both need the same package and end up having to compile the library themselves because there's no existing repo.

Ultimately (way down the road thinking here) we should be able to bake a source once and have it produce both a IPK and a PND package for applications. It'll take a litte work for some packages, but it will be worth it. Most applications won't know the difference if they are in /usr/bin or /mnt/utmp/ and will be happy with just export HOME = `$pwd`  It's a win-win.