A Joeish Erlang distribution (long)

[WILLIAMS Dominic]

I am currently evaluating Erlang with a view to adopting it for a railway traffic supervision system. Here is my view on a separate Erlang distribution, and on the packaging, and how all that would affect my evaluation process.

I would have been put off if I had discovered that there were several Erlang distributions. It is hard enough to decide whether or not to adopt Erlang without having to decide which one to use, or being afraid that the one I choose would one day become obsolete because the other one is better.

I also would be less impressed with Erlang if it did not come with so much stuff, even though all of it may not be useful for me. So I think having several packages is also a bad idea. Java is (for some reason) very popular, so no one seems to be put off having to download a huge, single package, which includes lots of stuff they don't need. I think this need to leave out certain things is only for experienced users: the solution I would favour is simply a better quality overall makefile, where dependencies are not broken, and where you can choose your targets...

There is nothing preventing other folks extending Erlang (e.g. the web stuff that has been mentioned) by providing additional apps, that can be downloaded separately... It is up to these contributors to provide good quality code, and also good quality build/installation scripts, and documentation, so that the contributions become used by the Erlang community!

Just my two cents worth...