Hah, that brings back some memories! 2005?! Yes, it must have been around a decade ago now.
It was written in thousands of lines of bash because back then, I had used some random distro that didn't have Python installed out of the box so I became convinced that only bash would be compatible enough. No clue if that perception was actually right - Python would probably have worked well enough. The GUI was in C/GTK. Some of the binary compatibility tools were an unholy mix of bash, C and assembler :)
The notes are still around afaict: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AutopackageIntegration