Mezzanine is a set of tools which simplify the management of software packages and collections of software packages. It provides encapsulation for source and package management as well as a streamlined mechanism for making changes to these packages.

Mezzanine is currently not as well documented as I'd like, but this site contains some good articles on how to use Mezzanine to maintain SRPM's under revision control, how to create Mezzanine packages from raw tarballs, etc. Feel free to download the packages (see attached files) and try them out. There is currently just one mailing list for Mezzanine, mzdevel@nplus1.net.

There are some things Mezzanine can do that aren't strictly related to product management, however. For example, I use Mezzanine as a wrapper around all my CVS work with Eterm and libast. All my commits, updates, additions, removals, etc. are done via mzput, mzget, mzadd, mzrm respectively. I also use the package management tools to create all my SRPM packages (including the one linked above). And of course, Mezzanine is the backbone of cAos, the community-driven RPM-based Linux distribution that isn't Fedora (and isn't controlled by Red Hat). All packages contained in cAos are modified and maintained solely using Mezzanine (mzimport, mzprep, mzpatch, and mzput primarily).

Mezzanine greatly simplifies many tasks associated with maintaining packages, and that portion of it is fairly easy to learn with some basic instructions. You can easily import and modify SRPM's with only the most basic knowledge of the toolkit. However, managing entire software products with Mezzanine is a complex task which should probably not be attempted by anyone but me. :-)

If you like Mezzanine or find it useful, feel free to send me some feedback. Bug reports are also welcome, but those should probably go to the list. Anyway, good luck, and enjoy! :-)