[erlang-questions] Version numbering scheme change and the implication / Re: [ANN] Erlang/OTP 17.0-rc1 has been released.

[Dave Cottlehuber]

It's great to see an improved version scheme being implemented, and
I'm also interested in the responses to questions already raised.

Can the OTP team make it standard/easy to extract these numbers
externally for compatibility testing, whether in rebar, erlang.mk or
other Makefile/autoconf based systems? I'm sure I am not the only
person who hacked stuff up for this!

Something like `erlang:system_info(compat_rel).` would be ideal -
yielding a simple string representation of the number, and removing
the need to run sed or whatever to tidy it up afterwards. If this is
not available (e.g. in older OTP releases) we can fall back  on
`erlang:system_info(otp_release).` which provides all the info but
needs subsequent parsing.

A+
Dave