Longstanding issues: structs & standalone Erlang

[Romain Lenglet]

> The main problem is still is that there is no such
> distribution system that is present on all OS. I guess that's
> why many roll out their own.
>
> This mechanism doesn't help much either if I just want to
> distribute a smallish binary application to my colleague,
> right? Or am I missing something?

No, you didn't miss anything. ;-)


My first point was: the solution to this problem must not be 
imposed, e.g. integrated in the implementation of Erlang, and 
must be left to external tools.

My second point was: to make it easy to package an application 
with the widest range of external packaging tools possible, 
developers must still make an effort, e.g. by using GNU's 
autotools (as Fredrik Thulin pointed out, if it is sufficient to 
run ./configure ; make ; make install, then any packaging tool 
can be used), by following the standard OTP directory hierarchy, 
etc.
Those "constraints" to developers should be written formally, in 
an "OTP packaging guidelines" document (?).
I am thinking of something like these packaging guidelines for 
Ruby and Java, but even more precise:
http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/upstream-devs.html
http://www.jpackage.org/request.php


Once those rules are clear, it becomes easy to develop new 
external tools (including tools that automatically create 
self-contained, self-installable executables...), and to make 
packaging for any existing system straightforward.

-- 
Romain LENGLET