Comment 34 for bug 64032

It occurred to me to check if there are any similar tools to rpmstrap, but which are still actively supported upstream, and I quickly found "mach":

http://thomas.apestaart.org/projects/mach/

This covers most of the distributions which rpmstrap does, and a few others. The main comparative omission seem to be SuSE 10.0.

And it's packaged for Ubuntu already:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/admin/mach

The distro list in the description seems to be a little out of date - look at the list of files to see an up-to-date list.

I've not actually tried mach out yet, but assuming it works as advertised it would probably be more productive to direct effort to fixing any shortcomings mach has compared to rpmstrap.