[erlang-questions] Building, Packaging and Installing

[Ciprian Dorin Craciun]

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 11:03 PM, Tim Watson <watson.timothy@REDACTED> wrote:
> Eric Merit and I have had some lengthy discussions about this on the Erlware mailing list and have some ideas that I think are pretty solid.

    I'm glad to hear this. (I'll give it a look.)


> The thing is though, you don't just need tools - you also need people to package their stuff up using the tools.

    I agree about this. In fact I think currently there are a lot of
tools with diverging solutions.

    Also I don't think that one "blessed" tool would be the final
answer. I would have taken a somehow different road, similar maybe to
how Go is going (although they do have the "one" tool): i.e. strict
conventions.

    What do I mean is this:
    a) it would be nice to have a standardized way to specify "extra"
options to compile an Erlang module. (We have the module attributes
that we could use.) (the same for C sources);
    b) we already have a standard project layout; (i.e. `./src`,
`./include`, etc.)
    c) we already have a standard project dependencies (i.e. the `app` file);

    All we need to do is be consistent in this convention, and then
all the various build and packaging systems could adapt.