[erlang-questions] Erlang 10 years of Open Source; it is time for the next step

Torbjorn Tornkvist tobbe@REDACTED
Mon Mar 17 11:38:44 CET 2008


Hi,

I just got back from QCon 2008 in London.
Lots of interesting presentations, and among them
one by Joe Armstrong about Erlang.

One talk was about the Eclipse team and how they had
gone from a closed development style to a style where
all their internal processes was completely open to public(*).

It is now 10 years (I think...) since Erlang became Open Source.
The last year, the interest in Erlang has exploded and I think
it is time to take the next step; open up the development of Erlang.

Now, I know that Erlang is buried in Clearcase somewhere in the
dungeons of Ericsson and that it probably will be a major undertaking
to change the "corporate policy". I think however that the matter
is worth discussing.

So, suggestions:

- Put Erlang into a modern (distributed) VCS like Mercurial or Git.
- Make it possible to browse the full repository.
- Open up the bug-tracker to become fully public.
- Publish the testserver result, e.g using CruiseControl.
- Make the whole testsuite available for download and deployment.
- Open up any other (as of today) internal dev.tools, wikis etc.

This way, it would be easy for the public to provide well tested
patches that easily can be tracked. It would make it easier both
for the OTP team to cherry-pick patches as well as make it easier
to maintain non-accepted patches in ones own respositories.

Cheers, Tobbe

(*) www.jazz.net




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