[erlang-questions] support for .ez archives

[Jack Moffitt]

Whoops, accidentally sent this only to Tim. Resending to the list:

> In general, I think .ez archives are an ideal unit of packaging and
> distribution (as dependencies) and therefore making them fully self
> contained is very helpful. If you specify 'lager >= 1.0.2' as a dependency
> and all I have to do is find and fetch the archive (and check the MD5 and
> whatnot) then stick it somewhere useful on the machine, the subsequent build
> (handling of dependent packages), release assembly and other things just
> work really nicely. Having to 'manually' pull the includes out before being
> able to utilise the archive as a compile time dependency is just a bit
> annoying for tools authors that's all.

+1

Clojure gets something like this for free since it uses Java's jar
system. Jars can contain configuration, source, images, or anything
else. Not only do all the distribution and build tools make use of
this, but the libraries contain things to make reading files from
inside the jar really trivial.

I would love to see something similar in Erlang.

jack.