A lot of the research code I write and distribute relies on mathematics libraries written by other people. Those libraries in turn have numerous dependencies, and keeping track of all this manually can be quite time consuming and complicated. Dorsal is my attempt at a simple package management system that hopes to alleviate this problem.
Dorsal being used to install the FEniCS Project on Ubuntu.
Dorsal is capable of building mathematical software aimed at solving differential equations (the FEniCS Project, Deal.ii and Dune), as well as their dependencies, for various platform. It is written in Bash and distributed under the GNU GPL.