Terminating application during startup

[Fredrik Thulin]

On Wednesday 22 March 2006 10:42, Gunilla Arendt wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This bug is fixed in OTP R11B.

Thanks.

> I'm not quite sure what you mean with "terminating nicely". If you
> mean that you want the node to survive even if an application fails
> to start, set the type of the application to transient in the .rel
> file.

I'm using Erlang to write a SIP-server that I want to make work like 
most other server softwares people are used to, so that it can be used 
without any knowledge about Erlang, beam, Mnesia and so on, just 
regular system administration skills.

In my opinion, this means that if certain fatal errors occur during 
startup, the Erlang VM (whole node) should terminate with 

   * a nice and understandable error message on standard output

and

   * a non-zero exit status so that people can start the server from a 
     shellscript and know if it failed or succeeded.

Also, the generation of erl_crash.dump should be avoided when I (as 
programmer) don't think it is needed (for example, the server could be 
started in a just-test-the-config-syntax mode).

/Fredrik