Hello !
With a couple of other guys, I am working on a new mame package for Debian GNU/Linux and derivatives.
Experienced debian users can have a look at it here:
http://indefero.shaperstudio.com/p/mamedeb/

As Debian requires a man pages from each binary we wrote man pages for each mame tool. In case someone is interested these man pages are available here:
http://indefero.shaperstudio.com/p/mamedeb/issues/view/attachment/1/mame-tools.extramanpages.zip

We have included two fixes in you packages:
* On powerpc we build with the flag ARCHOPTS=-Upowerpc. This is needed to compile unidasm.c The gory technical details are explained here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?format=multiple&id=539832

* we needed to rename four utilities to mame-something because regrep, split, src2html, scrclean comflict with the unix/linux binaries namespace.

To whom it may concern:
thank you for keeping the sdl port mame, in good shape, and in the main mame tree !

Hi,

Sample man pages do come with the MAME source, please check src/osd/sdl/man.

The regrep/split/src2html/srcclean utilities don't actually need to be packaged. They don't do anything useful for end users, and devs don't need them unless they're the one posting a source release.

I'll look into the "-Upowerpc" problem when I'm back from vacation. Please let me know if any other issues occur.

-RB

hello !

ok i will look into removing these binaries from the packages

in any case we always prefer to minimize the number of patches / options which differs from the mamedev source distribution