catkin is 100% ROS agnostic. All ROS specific environment variables and settings are setup as hooks into catkin, so that catkin does not depend on ROS.
catkin has been used in non-ROS projects and can be run with only these dependencies:
- CMake
- Python
- catkin_pkg (python library for catkin)
Other tools have varying degrees of ROS integration.
rosdep is used to convert dependency names listed in the package.xml into calls to the system package manager. For example, rosdep will convert boost to sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev on ubuntu and to brew install boost on OS X.
bloom will generate Debian debs and (as of very recently) Fedora rpms for you, in a ROS agnostic way, but a lot of the features in bloom are ROS specific and github.com specific.
Other tools like catkin_simple do use some ROS specific stuff, but generally can be used without.
As for distribution. Currently we are still working towards a version of catkin which can be easily distributed through Debian proper, but it isn't a huge priority because you can easily bootstrap your build with catkin by just putting catkin's source code into your workspace.
You might even be able to see catkin in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe10Ex...
EDIT: More details have been posted here: http://osrfoundation.org/blog/project...
