[erlang-questions] Building, Packaging and Installing

[Vlad Dumitrescu]

Hi,

On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 9:37 AM, Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED> wrote:
>        How do we avoid version nightmares?
>
>        i.e. if A depends upon X.vsn1 and breaks with X.vsn2
>             and B depends upon X.vsn2 and breaks with X.vsn1
>        how can we run A and B in the same namespace?
(...snip...)
>         b) Declare A to be broken and fix it (assuming X.vsn2 is the
> latest and best version of
>              X)

This might be an obvious thing to point out (or maybe not), but in
real life (as an A developer) one might need to deliver both A.v4
(using X.v1) and A.v5 (using X.v2) because maybe some user/customer
can't upgrade to the latest and greatest right away or maybe there is
a C app that doesn't work with X.v1 yet. This might be a bit heavy on
an open-source project...

A remark about the manifest file: for a while ago I proposed some
extensions to the .app file:
http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2010-September/053354.html.
There was no reaction at all at the time, maybe it's not of general
interest, but if there will be a process of standardisation of
manifest data, I'd like to suggest to have a format open to extensions
that will be ignored by tools that don't understand them.

regards,
Vlad