A Joeish Erlang distribution (long)

[Miguel Barreiro Paz]

> This is strange because this idea converge with something I had in mind.
> I was looking for a good way to integrate contributed modules into an
> Erlang installation.

	In my humble opinion, the ability to automatically download,
compile and install modules would be nice, but not extremely useful (do
you really think that's a limiting factor for new or experienced Erlang
users?). On the other hand, a clearer and better established open source
development process for those modules or the core language itself would be
great. It has already been suggested before IIRC. Somebody submits a patch
or contrib, a commitee or iron-hand project lead either accepts or rejects
it with a reason.

	A more inviting "user contributions" page would be nice too - to
an Erlang newcomer, the current erlang.org/user.html page basically reads
"Erlang is an Ericsson thingie, and these are contributions from users
without our blessing - God knows if they work or not".

> I think we could build this kind of network on top of RPM. The main
> drawback is that this is Linux only. I think it is important to have

	(No longer - AIX includes some RPM support, and you can compile
RPM on other platforms). Anyway, it would be trivial to make .rpm or .deb
packages of all user contribs. I (mostly in a Debian world) just apt-get
install lib*-perl, whenever I need yet another perl module, so why not do
the same with erlang?

Regards,

Miguel