are the nemo/mer guys using different to pulseaudio setup to that in the meego gitorious repo? iirc there were some pa modules and the associated libs on there with references to maemo.

The package list is a must, but don't forget all the extra buld dependancies. some debian apps may have features enabled we don't need. i tried patching debian and rebuild all its toolchain for i686, so the entire system would be optimized, not just main packages like kernel and glibc. iirc apt/dpkg required a translation module (perl/python) which gave massive headaches in terms of rebuilding other packages.