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

[Michael Truog]

On 04/09/2014 11:52 PM, Rickard Green wrote:
>>>> 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.
If an OTP application is the smallest installable unit supported, it would be nice if the public Erlang/OTP release was broken up into these separate units so that they can be managed as distinct entities, the way they are intended to be.

Best Regards,
Michael

>
> Regards,
> Rickard Green, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB
>