A Joeish Erlang distribution (long)

[Kent Boortz]

"Vlad Dumitrescu (EAW)" <Vlad.Dumitrescu@REDACTED> writes:
> another reason for which the distribution structure would benefit
> from being revised (with ot without repackaging, but more so with)
> is that the build process will have to be revisited too. Cleaning up
> all dependencies and generally streamlining the Makefiles would make
> life much easier for maintainance.

Several former members in the OTP team tried to "rewrite the build
support from scratch to something much better" and failed. I think
improving it step by step is the best approach.  We are very thankful
for the portability patches and dependency corrections we get from
members of this list.

The dependency rules are really bad. The reason they don't improve
much from release to release is that when we develop interactively we
are working in ClearCase (a commercial big brother to CVS). It uses
its own file system and make command that keep track of (almost) all
the dependencies between files so basically we don't notice that we
use broken make files.

For the daily build of the OpenSource Erlang OTP we always build from
scratch and this doesn't really test that the dependency rules are
correct, just that they are correct enough to build from scratch.

> Not to mention that it might make possible to build on Cygwin! ;-)

A native Cygwin build is being worked on, it is improving nicely but
I can't say when it will be ready, 

kent