[erlang-questions] [ANN] Erlang/OTP 17.0 has been released

[Rickard Green]

>>
>>> How should we deal with understanding what has changed in a minor
>>> release?
>>>
>> I'm not sure I understand this question. Please, elaborate.
>
> An example of this problem is with R14B02.  I happen to know that erlzmq2
> (https://github.com/zeromq/erlzmq2/) requires R14B02 due to the NIF support
> within that release.  I know that checking for that release isn't as much of
> an issue now, due to its age, but when a similar problem appears for release
> 17 I will be unable to check for it, avoid it, or handle it, unless I try to
> do it based on individual OTP application versions. That requires that I
> know all the individual OTP applications which are at fault for the problem,
> or offer a new feature, but they are interconnected in various ways that are
> not trivial.  Due to Erlang/OTP commonly being released with a single
> version number, which defines a version set, a set of individual OTP
> application versions that work together, I think it is important to be able
> to check what version set exists is a simple way to make development and
> support issues simpler.  I could also take all individual OTP application
> versions and put them through a hash to get a sequence of hexadecimal, but
> the resulting string doesn't mean much to a person that just sees the
> hexadecimal string associated with an Erlang/OTP release.  The alternative
> would be to have separate installables for each individual OTP application,
> but that makes the situation more unstable if something doesn't enforce what
> version set is being used.  So, it would be much easier to check the
> existence of 17.0 or 17.0rc1 to avoid development and support problems.
>

If you make such decisions based on an OTP version, you will make the
wrong decisions on OTP installations consisting of applications from
multiple OTP versions. An OTP application is the smallest installable
unit supported. If you want to make such decisions based on version,
you should look at application version.

Regards,
Rickard Green, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB