A Joeish Erlang distribution (long)

[Joe Battelle]

As it seems difficult to package things in a way that suits everyone, I
would like to propose that the main OTP release continue to contain
everything, but that a script could be provided to crack the distribution
into a subset'ed archive that suits the user.  This subset can then be used
for multi-machine installs, or hosted by people with a specific interest in
Erlang (e.g. webservers).  The base script could be provided and enhanced by
members of the open source community, as well as by Ericsson.  In fact,
there would then not be much harm in having third-parties provide their own
scripts and subset'ed distributions (that would include YAWS, etc.) because
they could provide a link to the main distribution along with the source for
the script that generated the subset.  If users would like a minimal (or
YAWS specialized) Erlang system, but don't have the computing resources
(bandwidth/diskspace/development environment) to create it themselves, it
shouldn't be hard to get an Erlang community member to run the script and
provide the minimal distribution for them.

-joe b.