standalone erlang

[Joe Armstrong (AL/EAB)]

The whole point of having a stand-alone thing is that you distribute ONE file

I don't want that one file to explode into hundreds (or thousands) of files when I execute it
I want it to *stay* one file.

IMHO when you install a program on an OS you should move one file to the OS. When you
remove the program you should remove ONE file.

You should also <<almost>> obey the invarient - if you install something and then remove 
it the state of the system should be the same as it was before you installed it.

(why almost? - the *only* allowed change might be changes in a log file saying that you'd installed 
uninstalled a program)

If programs were distributed as single files and stayed that way then
life would be a lot easier. As it is my disk gets cluttered with thousands of files
and nobody knows which application owns them :-)

This means that programs should include a self-modifying virtual system etc.

If programs need to export things to other program they should do so with
a well defined interface which does not leave a mess on my disk (mess = loads of files, 
registy entries etc.)

Like the amazingly good tclkit



/Joe




> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-erlang-questions@REDACTED
> [mailto:owner-erlang-questions@REDACTED]On Behalf Of Vlad Dumitrescu
> Sent: den 16 februari 2005 21:36
> To: erlang-questions@REDACTED
> Subject: Re: standalone erlang
> 
> 
> To complete my own posting, there is a nice tool at 
> http://www.info-zip.org/ 
> that can be used to build self-extracting zip files, and it 
> runs on most 
> platforms too.
> 
> /Vlad
>