[erlang-questions] Stand Alone Erlang or Equivalent

[Bob Ippolito]

On 9/5/07, Benjamin Tolputt <bjt@REDACTED> wrote:
> Bob Ippolito wrote:
> > Out of curiosity, what's the problem with a CEAN style solution? It's
> > a standalone environment that you can move anywhere on the filesystem
> > and it should still work. Other than the naming of the directories,
> > it's not much different than how Mac OS X applications are packaged,
> > and nobody really complains about that.
> >
> > -bob
> >
> The problem is that the CEAN distribution requires the user to extract
> files to a directory tree THEN run a separate executable. For servers
> and so on (which generally require some form of "setup" to install
> anyway) this is not an issue, but for game development (the area of
> development the guys are working in) this is not so good (impatient,
> technically inexperienced user base).
>
> Something along the lines of a Py2EXE would be ideal. Py2EXE zips and
> concatenates the required Python ".pyd" (i.e. Python's equivalent to
> "beam" files) to the end of an executable stub. This executable stub
> knows that it needs to retrieve the required code files (or in our case
> Erlang "beam" files) from the compressed archive at the end of the file
> rather than from the local file-system.

I don't buy it. I never see files distributed online as a single
".exe" file unless it's an installer. More often it's either as a zip
or a msi, either of which will carry multi-file payloads just fine.

-bob