[erlang-questions] modular otp concerns

[Tuncer Ayaz]

I know that at least Bjoern-Egil has been investigating the possibility of
splitting up otp.git into sub repos, and before anything is set into
stone, I'd like to resolve one concern I have.

What will happen to the default distribution and the bundled libraries?

Is the plan to split it into core and extra? I'm concerned that if we
follow that route, we would lose the ability to rely on pretty useful
functionality available out of the box. For example, today it's very
convenient that I can write an escript which:
 * interacts with the network (http, ssh, snmp, etc.)
 * compiles sources for various languages
 * creates or extracts tarballs or zip archives
 * inspects a (remote) node
 * much more...

If anything, I'd like to see more functionality bundled, not less. We
can create escript (zip) archives and bundle extra libs, but that's not
always a good fit, especially not for scripts you want to keep in a
project's repo.

If the modular project structure will prevent that out of the box
functionality, we would give up a crucial advantage otp.git has over
other scriptable languages' default distros. We've all seen what this
lead to in several linux distros that split out Perl's or Python's
bundled libs.

What are the exact plans?