Longstanding issues: structs & standalone Erlang

[Fredrik Thulin]

On Wednesday 22 February 2006 08:28, Bengt Kleberg wrote:
...
> i would like to have a simple build/install system for normal erlang
> applications/libraries that would work without a gnu system
> (autotools, gnumake, gtar, gcc, etc).

By any means. I have never intendet to say that GNU make should be 
required. I did say that for me, make is GNU make, but I also said that 
YXA could be compiled with BSD make. That didn't happen by accident, 
and did require some work from my side, so that people like you could 
compile YXA with BSD make as well.

I bet that when we talk about Erlang in this thread, we all mean the 
Ericsson Erlang/OTP though - not just any Erlang ;).

...
> > Again, Autoconf and make are the best choice in an Unix world,
> > and can also easily be used on Windows (Cygwin), but you can
> > discuss it.
>
> i do not belive that Autoconf and make are the best choice in an Unix
> world.

To be honest I don't particularly like Autoconf either. What I _do_ like 
is the de-facto standardized interface to install things that 
'./configure; make; make install' provides. If 'configure' is really 
created by Autoconf or is in fact a perl-script (or what have you) 
doesn't matter to me, as long as it accepts the command line options I 
(as a packager) am used to (like --prefix).

> > It was also proposed to make every application (including every
> > OTP app) released separately between developers and packagers,
> > and (at least) between packagers and end users.
> > Everybody seems to agree on that point.
>
> what if the packagers moved upstreams and became a part of the
> developers?

This is totally unrealistic. Do you think that people from every 
distribution packaging stuff will want to become developers in all the 
languages they package?

Bengt, it is rather clear to me that we have incompatible opinions in 
this matter. Without the intent of being condescending, I beleive that 
you consider Erlang to be a substantial part of your computer. This 
might be true for me too, personally, but as a packager, Erlang, Yaws, 
ejabberd and YXA together is less than one percent of all the packages 
in buildit (and buildit is small, with only ~650 packages).

To be able to afford the effort, such small parts of the overall suite 
of packages can't require custom packaging methods. If we want Erlang 
applications to be available through the big distributions packaging 
systems, we must minimize the trouble the packagers have to go through, 
or create applications that creates a demand for the packagers to learn 
how to package them.

I personally don't think we can create such demand without getting the 
distributions to package our applications _first_.

/Fredrik