[erlang-questions] Reltool, system crashes and ports

[Håkan Mattsson]

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 2:36 PM, Robert Virding
<robert.virding@REDACTED> wrote:
> I was just gently pointing out that wx, and therefore reltool, is not
> very stable on a common platform. A corollary to this is that it might
> not be a good thing to base new tools on wx until it is stable, and
> definitely not convert old, functioning tools to use it.
>
> The main point I was (gently) trying to make is that it is a Good Thing
> when building reliable systems to avoid as much as possible including
> things in the base system which aren't absolutely necessary and which
> can be run in other OS processes. It lessens the number of things which
> can cause the whole system to crash and increases the number of things
> which you can safely use even if they might crash. In this case it was a
> graphics interface which caused the crash! So in this context wx as it
> stands is not safe for use in reliable systems.

I agree that it is a pity that wx is not as stable on Mac as on other platforms.
But do you not exaggerate a bit? The graphical tools in Erlang/OTP
are mostly used during development and most of them can be run on
nodes separate from the mission critical live nodes.

/Håkan