[erlang-questions] What problem are we trying to solve here? [was Erland users group [was re: languages in use? [was: Time for OTP to be Renamed?]]]

[Ludovic Demblans]

Hi,

> % erl -install cowboy

In my humble opinion, such a command is basically a tool who does a few  
things : lookup in a repository index a package named 'cowboy', fetch it,  
compile it in a place and update a file (like $HOME/.erlang) to add it to  
the path. Someone may have said it already in the millions mails of the  
list I couldn't read today, but the main problem would be "Who handles the  
repository index".

I believe there are already such indexes, one for elixir and one called  
agner. Maybe others. IMHO if "the Erlang/OTP group at Ericsson" (as said  
on erlang.org) starts such an official packages index, writing a script   
to fetch the packages will take less than hour, rebar will be updated to  
handle this, and multiple tools will appear in the community. The main  
thing is to find who will be considered as an "official enough" index  
maintainers.

(sorry for bad english ...)

Ludovic Demblans



Le Mon, 17 Feb 2014 05:05:33 +0100, Leo Liu <sdl.web@REDACTED> a écrit:

> On 2014-02-17 10:07 +0800, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
>> For a comparison, I look at R.  It's not owned by a business,
>> but it _is_ managed by a core of bright dedicated people who
>> keep on rolling out ever-better releases.
>>
>> The one thing that they have that Erlang doesn't is a *large*
>> repository of 3rd-party libraries.  Having a single place
>> to look for stuff (linked right off the main page) is good for
>> everyone.  (There's a single place to *look*; there are mirrors
>> for *downloading*, which is as simple as
>> 	> install.packages(c("wigwam","goose","bridle"))
>> That will
>>  - fetch the latest descriptions
>>  - download whatever needs downloading
>>  - unpack whatever needs unpacking
>>  - compile whatever support code needs compiling
>>  - put everything where it can be found
>>  - including documentation and examples.
>>
>> When we can do something like
>>
>> % erl -install cowboy
>>
>> won't that be nice?
>
> You nailed it, the single most important change that would make a major
> difference to erlang.
>
> The emacs community has a similar story. Now they have three major
> package archives: an official one and two provided by the community. In
> under 2 years, thousands of packages appeared. Now users need not deal
> with editing features or problems upfront and just package-install
> solutions.
>
> Leo
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