I'm one of the people involved in the development of Debian-BR-CDD distribution, here in Brazil. This project had its first release in 2004 in FISL (Free Software Internation Forum) and since that it continues to grow a lot.

Debian-BR-CDD has the goal of being easy to install and to continue to be compatible with Debian et all. It uses Debian's "sarge" as base and it only includes bugfixes from "etch" when it's really needed.

To make our work easier, we developed some tools and processes that help us to keep it working well. Some of those tools are the use of debpartial-mirror that was written to fullfil the need of a good debian partial mirror tool that could merge mirrors and the use of DAK to handle our specific packages.