It has been anonymously hinted to me by Bert and Brane that I should really think about rewriting backport.pl in a language other than Perl.
Right now, backport.pl can do four things: the nightly mergebot; the hourly conflicts detector bot; and the two interactive functions from my earlier email today. However, it's written in Perl, and the internals aren't that pretty to read even if for people comfortable with Perl. So, assuming backport.pl had been rewritten in Python, what kind of API would it have? The STATUS parsing would be encapsulated by some class; what methods would it expose?
