[erlang-questions] rebar dev

[Tim Watson]

On 25 Jun 2013, at 16:08, Tiago Cury wrote:

> - package build, build phases, dependency retrieval.
> 
> With rebar, if your app depends on a non-rebar app their dependencies are not retrieved.
> 

I'm well aware of these issues - they are the reasons that I wrote the rebar_alien_plugin, rebar_alt_deps and rebar_dist_plugin packages on github. I agree it would be better if there was a standardised approach, but IMO the community would be best served by

1. agreeing *how* this is *supposed* to work in practise
2. patching rebar only if necessary
3. performing all the /custom/ actions in a plugin
4. seeing whether anyone bothers to adopt it

If (4) is successful, then there's maybe an argument for putting the changes into rebar itself. The *major* problem here is lack of traction and (more importantly) agreement in the Erlang open source community. A tool can't actually solve that issue. Maven became popular once it was released and enough people who were fed up with Ant decided to jump ship. Ivy came along and some jumped back. Then the rest, etc etc.

And just for the record, I have spent many hours discussing this with Tuncer, Dizzy, Eric Merrit and the Erlware guys and others too. So far there have been lots of ideas and quite a few very reasonable arguments for keeping the status quo. Feel free to propose something concrete! :)

Cheers,
Tim