patchdep analyzes patch dependencies to compute the minimal subset of patches you need from a potentially
large series of patches, in order to support the set of features that you require.
It is invoked as: patchdep -patchset [list of patches] -iwant [list of desired patches] -dontwant [list of undesireed patches] -dot [dot file name]
Download
Check it out of the Planet-Lab SVN: svn://svn.planet-lab.org/svn/patchdep.
Or get the source code here. You'll need ocaml to compile it: analyze patch dependencies.
When to use it
You would want to use patchdep when you have a large number of patches that
depend on each other, of which you only need a small set. We went through this
problem in the VINI project. We needed
about 30 patches from Andrew Morton's version of the Linux tree, which consisted
of over 2000 patches. Moreover, we needed to leave out the then fresh-out-of-the-oven
"cfs scheduler". If you're in a similar situation, then you might give this tool a shot.