[erlang-questions] how do you build your releases with/without rebar?

[Loïc Hoguin]

Just want to make sure one thing is clear.

On 04/10/2014 07:52 PM, Fred Hebert wrote:
> If you end up having to pay that price purely because the build tool you
> settled for was opinionated about whether the apps in the apps/ or lib/
> directory need to be checked out from other repositories or if they can
> be in there already, fix that build tool of yours, because it's
> clearly making decisions it should not be making.
>
> What's more important is that a tool that supports both the apps/* and
> the OTP app model can be able to also support *both* of these workflows
> (using deps or not to build the release), depending on which is
> appropriate for your project, team, and/or community.
>
> Denying people a way to organize their own workflow because of your
> personal opinion when the end result for the files on disk is the exact
> same (someone just disagrees about how they ended up there), to me,
> tells me that maybe your tool is a bit too opinionated and may need to
> take a step back.

With regards to erlang.mk, there's nothing to fix. There's nothing it 
does that prevent you from using the apps/* layout. There's nothing in 
it that makes it all happen for you either, because that's simply not 
the goal of the tool. But it can still fit very easily in an apps/* 
layout, as demonstrated by the gist previously posted. IRCCloud is one 
such big project that uses both erlang.mk and an apps/* layout, all 
without any problems AFAIK.

erlang.mk will always focus on one OTP application because that's what 
it's designed to do well. Making it work on two different scopes just 
makes everything harder, and then you end up with nonsense like "rebar 
ct compile -r skip_deps=true" (quoting you) to make it do what you want. 
I do not want that. On the other hand I want to give greater power to 
the user to override or complement the default behavior, and that 
alongside Windows support is most of the work that remains to be done 
for erlang.mk 1.0. (Not that you can't change its behavior already -it's 
a text file after all!- but I want to make it even simpler.)

tl;dr Do one thing and do it well; do it right by default but allow 
overriding its behavior easily.

-- 
Loïc Hoguin
http://ninenines.eu