Too little, way too late.
There are many approaches that one would mistake as being "reinventing the wheel":
1. FreeBSD ports system is barebones, but incredibly simple and transparent.
2. Arch Linux's PKGBUILD recipes are also simple and, at times, a much better alternative to binary packages.
3. Gobo Linux (http://www.gobolinux.org) solved binary packaging the right way by having each package in it's own tree. It's approach is similar to OS X, which also gets this right.
Almost exactly what happened when I installed nmh. Wasn't at all obvious from the dependency list that I'd get qmail, didn't pay attention to the warning prompt and said Y, ...
Bonus, I have a bunch of new system accounts in my Display Manager's login screen. Bleah. Fortunately my scorched-earth reinstall is coming up, so I just leave them there to make it easier to hate what happened.
They don't cover all edge cases perfectly. But for a user who is new to Linux and wants to install some software, it's better than what we've got on any other OS except ones with dedicated and closed app stores.
Right now, I have to maintain my own list of GnuWin32 installers (wget coreutils cygutils diffutils findutils grep gzip less patch sed tar unzip) retrieved from sf.net, with a 30 lines batch script to deploy them, plus a powershell command to retrieve wget as the first step.