[erlang-questions] reducing size of erlang

[Matthias Lang]

On Tuesday, July 15, mog wrote:

> congrats on getting it down so small, but I'm curious as to why you 
> didn't try Debian port of gumstix or the Debian arm port of Erlang?  
> Seems like it would be easiest way to get started from their you could 
> build your own Erlang image and shrink it some more?

I realise the question isn't really aimed at me.

One reason to avoid "just using Debian" is that you have to be sure
that Debian's toolchain is compatible with your hardware. E.g.  the
Debian powerPC section does _not_ work on the MPC860 powerPC CPU
because of different cache line lengths. The symptoms are random crashes
and memory corruption.

The above isn't intended as "Debian ARM won't work on gumstix". I don't
know if it does or doesn't. It's intended as "make sure you understand
the differences, if any, between the gumstix toolchain and the debian
maintainer's toolchain". If in doubt, build it yourself.

Matt