We use CHIMPS for smoking in Best Practical. It's modular
client server testing toolkit. One of its parts is smoking
client that works with SVN repositories.
It's really simple things, at least it was, you describe
projects in repositories, dependencies between them, start
smoker and commit to the repos without being affraid you
break backwards compatibility.
There are multiple case when it's useful. Sure you just
smoke test your projects, but also you can smoke your
project against repository of a module you don't control,
but depend on heavily.
For example, you use Moose a lot with fancy things,
its bleeding edge features and some workarounds. Chimps
may be the only way to help you prevent disaster before
new broken version of Moose is on the CPAN. To do this
you setup smoking your project and describe Moose
repository as well, so smoking goes against Moose's HEAD.
You also can test your project with Moose that is installed
on the system, with Moose's tag 0.01 and Moose's HEAD. All
this in one smoker.
Several days ago I started implementing a new tiny thing
in the smoker. This change end up in total refactoring
of the module and now we can smoke from git too.
Adding additional back end now is easy. You have to
implement four methods in a class.
Sadly there were no releases since 2006, so you have to
check it out from github.
I'm planning on releasing a dev version on the CPAN.