[erlang-questions] Building, Packaging and Installing

[alisdair sullivan]

> I also don't use any of rebar, agner, etc., mainly because I've
> hacked something on-top of the ninja build system.

> P.S.: I hate Java from the bottom of my heart, but boy-o-boy is
> the Java tooling way better than that of Erlang... I mean what Erlang
> is missing is something similar to NodeJS's NPM, or Java's Maven
> (minus the XML baggage and all useless complexities), or Python
> setup-tools (with virtual environment), etc...

the erlang tooling situation is really dire. there's some powerful stuff hidden
away in the standard release, but it's accessibility is poor. common_test, in
particular, has awful documentation that's only useful if you already know how
to use common_test

rebar and sinan were a huge leap forward from the previous 'standard' of
emakefiles and hand rolled build systems, but why is our primary interface to
living images (in the smalltalk sense) a collection of command line scripts?
rebar and sinan's functionality should be as easily accessible from within a
running node as it is from the command line. we use primitive tools like
reloader.erl when we should have build environments that make concerns like
reloading code irrelevant. you shouldn't need to roll a full release to manage
name clashes in applications, registered processes and loaded code


what the erlang ecosystem needs is a distributed repository of applications
and releases, and better tools for working with them. forget cramming a bunch
of stuff you found on github into your path and hoping for the best

i'm mostly all talk, but i did do this: https://github.com/talentdeficit/erlenv

that's just a tiny step, but hopefully it helps start the process