[erlang-questions] Re: Distributions of Erlang-coded SW on Windows (really)

[Ulf Wiger]

Michael Turner wrote:
>>> What's the best way to distribute Erlang powered, proprietary and
>>> non-proprietary, softwares?
>> The best way is to have a product that is so awesome that people give
>> you money even though you have fully it open source and receive
>> patches to make it even more awestruck. Nobody can argue with that.
> 
> Look, this was a serious question about packaging, not quality or, for
> that matter, open source ideology.  And that should have been clear
> enough from the context.  It's a question worthy of an answer.
> 
> Moreover, it matters.  [...]

There is no single "best" way.

Historically, Erlang-based software have executed in closed
clusters on proprietary platforms with a ton of software,
of which perhaps half (sometimes more) has been erlang.
Sometimes, it has made sense to have an erlang-centric
packaging and release system, sometimes not.

OTP has provided systools for more than a decade. It has a
function called make_tar(), which is perfectly usable, if
one is fine with first installing erlang, then unpacking and
installing the application. Since some of the initial paying
customers even ran Erlang on vxWorks, it was important that
the packaging supported by Erlang/OTP was universal and highly
portable.

There have been several other attempts:
- CEAN (http://cean.process-one.net/)
- Erlware (http://www.erlware.org/)
- SAE (initially by Joe Armstrong, now supported by OTP)
- erlrc 
(http://dukesoferl.blogspot.com/2009/05/automatic-app-file-generation.html)


BR,
Ulf W
-- 
Ulf Wiger
CTO, Erlang Training & Consulting Ltd
http://www.erlang-consulting.com