[Savannah-hackers] epm and savannah patch manager

[Karl Berry]

Hello savannah hackers,

GNU was recently offered some patch manager software, named (at the
moment) epm.  It is hosted on savannah.nongnu.org now:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/epm

Its purpose is to manage uninstalled patches in a fairly sophisticated
way.  You can define dependencies, modify the patches, and so on.
The author wrote it to manage (the numerous) patches that he submits to
various free software patches.

I sent my basic evaluation to rms, and he suggested that since savannah
has a patch manager feature, I ask you about this.  He writes:
  Would we want to change Savannah to use epm?  If not, why not?  Could
  he make it into something we'd want to use on savannah?  If we are to
  reoommend this to others for the purpose, we should make sure it's
  something we'd want to use ourselves for the purpose.

So, would you mind taking a look and seeing what you think?  At first
glance, it seemed to me that epm had more functionality than the current
patch manager, although coming up with a web ui for it is of course
a separate and nontrivial task.

If you have any suggestions for the author, I'll be happy to forward them.

Is savannah using built-in code now for the patch manager feature, or
some externally-released software?  I had the impression it was
built-in, but I don't know for sure.

By the way, there is no documentation now beyond --help.  If you want to
try it, the author informs me that the basic idea is "epm push IDENT",
followed by "epm add PATCHFILE".

Thanks,
karl