Hack Management

[Dankinit]

I'm sorry if this has been brought up before, I searched a lot of forums for key words such as "install" "manage" "hack" and nothing on this subject came up.

Has there been any attempts to create a hack management system for all these hacks? It seems very time consuming to edit these files everytime a new version, hack is released. Here's what I thought it would work like.

All hacks would have standard install scripts (which they basically do now except these install scripts are made for humans not programs). The hack management script would have the ability to take a hack and apply it. A sample hack install file would look something like:

FILE: member.php
FIND CODE:
echo "Code to be found and replaced";
// etc
REPLACE CODE:
echo "New code entered here";
//etc
RUN SQL:
update sometable value = 1;

You could build in some error checking, so that if it didn't find code it would recurse back up the file to revert back to original before ending saying "sorry hack couldn't be installed". It could check structure of tables before applying any mysql changes to make sure the tables exist, their fields are the same.

Even in the install script you could have a

WARNING: 
place warning message here to end user

before the script is run that displays a message to end user or a README section.

But this wouldn't just be an install script. It would have a easy list of all hacks you have installed, when they were installed. If you upgraded your vB version, you could then reapply these hacks. And if modifications had been made to the core vB files, it would just fail out saying "Sorry I couldn't find X code in member.php" at a FIND CODE: line and wouldn't install the script.

Has this been done? Sorry if this has been discussed, because I'd really like to be able to use something like this to manage the hacks. Thanks look forward to comments.