i might confuse that with scratchbox, but doesn't MADDE too download tarballs and extracts them into the chroots?
and, basically everything needed should exist in maemo repositories (libs, headers, devel-packages)**.
lastly, the pathes to libs and headers should be directories below the chroots.

thus: what about a script that allows downloading devel packages and libs, converts them to tarballs (either with alien or with ar, since debian packages are nothing but ar archives containing data.tar.gz which is the actual archive we need here) and extracts them into the matching folders? as long as the folders follow the structure maemo uses simply extracting them below a certain folder should be sufficient.

since the apt stuff is mostly perl, the scripts needed to calculate dependencies should be available cross platform and maybe easily adapted to these limited needs.

** after playing around with scratchbox i see that nokia makes a huge secret of their packages (you have to accept some eula, get a number and scratchbox creates an apt line with a lengthy checksum as url part).
not sure how important those packages are and if they would be available to MADDE (is MADDE a nokia project after all?).
still confirms my opinion nokia doesn't like development for maemo.