[erlang-questions] Erlang application packaging

[Jean Parpaillon]

Hi all,
I'm Jean Parpaillon, new erlang enthusiast and (soon) programmer. On 7
past years, I've workedon distributed systems, specially in HPC and
cloud computing. I'm trying to develop an XMPP agent for system
management, written in Erlang. This is the introduction, now the
question :)
What is your preferred packaging/deployment system for erlang ? I have a
code running, from erlang shell, and want it to become a real world
application the user can install from an archive and launch from its
shell, eventually with some parameters.

I've read about systools, and how to generated .app, .appup, .rel, .boot
and so on. This looks fine but a lot to do by hand. When it comes to
update a file, and release the whole stuff, one have to modify plenty of
others. Or am I wrong ?
I've looked to existing applications or 'helloworld's: some of them
using autotools (ejabberd, ...), a lot of others using rebar, sometime a
little a bit of both, iirc.
rebar has a lot of magic, which makes debugging hard.
autotools is not well designed for erlang, but putting some existing m4
files here and there seems to fit. At least, I know autotools well. I
know how can I generate .app, .rel and so on with autotools, but I don't
know what to put in it :/
At the end, for launching the application, I've seen many projects not
using .boot files, but a shell script with tons of arguments to erl...

I'm a little bit confused :( Any help ?

Best regards,
-- 
Jean Parpaillon
Open Source Consultant
Phone: +33 6 30 10 92 86
im: jean.parpaillon@REDACTED
skype: jean.parpaillon
linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanparpaillon/en

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