[erlang-questions] local vs. distributed differences?

[Raoul Duke]

hi,

reading the McErlang stuff, i learned that message delivery order is
only guaranteed when things aren't distributed. (looking around on the
net, it i've heard that it is further only when you have multiple
messages going from the same sender to the same receiver.)

so it sounds like taking a multi-actor local system and then trying to
scale out by moving to a bigger distributed system could turn up some
interesting "bugs". what are people's experience with this?

(and, as an aside, could the Erlang system be hacked to enforce
ordering even in a distributed setup? would that ever be useful, or
just silly?)

thank you.