[erlang-questions] Style question

[Tim Watson]

> I think you should assume that mnesia is up and running, and just
> declare that as a dependency of your application. Then you only have
> to try and read the data you want, and deal with the failure that the
> data is not there or the table doesn't exist.

Better still, use http://github.com/esl/setup to generate a "run once"
setup script that will create your schema/tables and then, as Jack
suggests, just assume mnesia is up and running. Or you could use
https://github.com/hyperthunk/appstart to ensure that mnesia is
running before starting your app:

start() ->
    appstart:start_deps(myapp),
    myapp_sup:start_link().