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I am currently looking for a website or a tool that would allow me to compare the package state of a particular software in different Linux distributions.

For instance, which version of gimp is provided by Mint, Ubuntu, Debian Sid and Fedora 18?

An immediate interest would be to be able to avoid reinventing the wheel when packaging software (for instance re-use patches from other distros).

whohas package (link) may help you.

Example

% whohas pidgin|grep "pidgin "
MacPorts pidgin 2.10.6 https://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/dports/net/pidgin/Portfile
Slackware pidgin 2.7.11-i486-3sl slacky.eu 
Slackware pidgin 2.7.0-i486-1 salixos.org 
Slackware pidgin 2.7.0-i486-1 slackware.com 
OpenBSD pidgin 2.9.0-gtkspell 8.3M 
OpenBSD pidgin 2.9.0 8.3M 16-Aug-201 
Mandriva pidgin 2.10.6-0.1.i586 http://sophie.zarb.org/rpms/a6ec6cd30f5fa024d14549eea375dba4
Fink pidgin 2.10.6-1 http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/pidgin
FreeBSD pidgin 2.10.6 net-im http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/pds.cgi?ports/net-im/pidgin
FreeBSD e17-module-everything-pidgin 20111128 x11-wm http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/pds.cgi?ports/x11-wm/e17-module-everything-pidgin
NetBSD pidgin 2.10.6nb5 10M 2012-12-15 chat http://pkgsrc.se/chat/pidgin
Ubuntu pidgin 1:2.10.0-0ubuntu2. 695K oneiric http://packages.ubuntu.com/oneiric/pidgin
Ubuntu indicator-status-provider-pidgin 0.5.0-0ubuntu1 7K oneiric http://packages.ubuntu.com/oneiric/indicator-status-provider-pidgin
Debian pidgin 2.7.3-1+squeeze3 706K stable http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/pidgin
Debian pidgin 2.10.6-2 591K testing http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/pidgin
Debian indicator-status-provider-pidgin 0.6.0-1 33K testing http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/indicator-status-provider-pidgin
Source Mage funpidgin 2.5.0 test 
Source Mage funpidgin 2.5.0 stable 
Source Mage pidgin 2.10.6 test 
Source Mage pidgin 2.10.5 stable 
Gentoo pidgin 2.10.6 http://gentoo-portage.com/net-im/pidgin 
Gentoo pidgin 2.10.4 http://gentoo-portage.com/net-im/pidgin 

The closest thing I've come across to a tool like this is pkgs.org:

pkgs.org - Linux Software Catalog and Packages Search The pkgs.org is
created to provide you with the simplest method of searching and
downloading the newest versions of the best Linux software - without
the usual excessive popups or spyware. Also use it to find
alternatives to commercial packages with expensive licensing fees and
complicated restrictions.

Features

• Search for RPM, DEB, TGZ, TXZ packages from well-known repositories of the Archlinux, Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Scientific Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mandriva, Mageia and Slackware distributions;


• Packages search by name, filename, summary, description, requires, provides, files and directories;


• Powerful packages browser (summary, description, files, requires, provides, changelog, etc.);


• Install Howtos for all available repositories;


• Free Software Catalog;


• RSS & Twitter;


• Fast servers to make your packages search as fast as possible;


• All packages are downloaded only from the official repositories!

Distrowatch has a table show what versions of software specific distros include. If you open your preferred distos in different tabs you can see what version of GIMP they have.

Here's Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora, there's a radio button to choose between seeing only the major packages and all packages. Select all packages if your package isn't on the major package list.

You can use the Repology website.

Repology analyzes a lot of package repositories and other sources* comparing packages versions across them and gathering other information. Repology shows you in which repositories a given project is packaged, which version is the latest and which needs updating, who maintains the package, and other related information.

It has some other useful features such as repository statistics. You can view a table of the package repositories it supports on its GitHub repository.

Here's a screenshot of its page for the versions for GIMP:

The legend for the label colours can be found at the bottom of this page. In short: