[erlang-questions] Erlang release management

[Geoff Cant]

"Matthew Dempsky" <matthew@REDACTED> writes:

> The OTP release management tools look really useful, but they also
> seem to have a steep learning curve.  I was curious if anyone on the
> mailing list has successfully used them in real-world deployments.

I almost got the hang of OTP releases.

I use systools to prepare release tarballs which I then turn into debian
packages. (This is because I didn't find the release_handler
documentation until I'd already deployed something - I saw the
system.tar.gz file and thought "Oh, you just untar it somewhere").

It would be good for someone (in their copious free time) to figure out
a better way of turning release tarballs into operating system packages
or write a code deployment/upgrade system as an alternative to
systools/release_handler.

In a debian package you could depend on the erlang runtime, install the
release tarball as /usr/share/<system>/<system>-<vsn>.tar.gz and call
release_handler:unpack_release and release_handler:install appropriately
in a postinst script.

Incidently, some FHS guidance on where to put installed systems would be
really useful (I don't like the idea of altering anything in the
$OTPROOT heirarchy).

Cheers,
-- 
Geoff