The original system was written by Alex Farell and it was implemented
with success in a big company. It was fully written in perl. It was
used, in the beginning, only for gnu tools.
Because I found the system really nice, I've taken it to integrate
most of the engineering tools of the company ( in a EDA environment
). I've done some improvements to the system needed to make the system
safer ( EDA tools are not gnu tools and do not always respect some
basic conventions ;-) ). I've written a lot of add-ons during my free
time.
To avoid all kind of legal problem, the "kernel" you will
find here was fully rewritten in C. Only the database stucture was
kept compatible with the installed database in this company.