Portius is simply about taking packages from one repo, filtering out the bad ones, extracting things like docs, and finally putting them into another repo in the correct place.
The 17th century A.D. saw the first known illustration of sand filters. The Italian physician Lucas Antonius Portius wrote the Soldier’s Vade Mecum in 1685, which details a multiple sand filtration method. In this illustration, Portius described three pairs of sand filters—each pair consisting of a downward-flow filter and an upward-flow filter.
Mr. Portius was a pioneer in filter design and so it is fiting that he is the namesake of the Portius application. This application is responsible for making sure that only well formed pure OTP apps make their way into our public repositories.
Documentation on the Portius release as well as a basic user guide can be found in the docs for the Portius application itself. This located at http://erlware.org/lib/5.5.5/portius-0.5.0.1/