[erlang-questions] Fwd: FW: runtime_dependencies part 2

[Michael Truog]

On 07/18/2014 08:38 AM, Andreas Schumacher wrote:
> Hi Tristan,
>
> As Kenneth responded to your post [1] a couple of months ago, there is room for improvement wrt to the handling of runtime_dependencies. We will continue to work on that issue, and we may write an EEP for collecting community input; although, I won't promise the latter. In any case, we appreciate your input and will consider it, regardless of an EEP.
>
> [1]: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2014-April/078730.html
>
> Andreas
>
> ---
>
> Andreas Schumacher, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB
>
>
> On 17/07/14 23:35, "Tristan Sloughter" <t@REDACTED <mailto:t@REDACTED>> wrote:
>
> >I wrote the list about runtime_dependencies in .app files now in 17+ a
> >couple months ago, http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/app.html
> >
> >Today I was informed that if you were to take all the
> >runtime_dependencies defined for kernel-3.x and their
> >runtime_dependencies you'd end up having wx as one, even for OTP built
> >without wx support.
> >
> >Yes, I know the second warning on the app man page says that just
> >because it is in there today doesn't mean it will be in the future and
> >is actively being worked on.
> >
> >My question is, wouldn't it be nice if the OTP team made an EEP that the
> >community could comment on for this? :)
> >
> >Tristan
> >_______________________________________________
> >erlang-questions mailing list
> >erlang-questions@REDACTED <mailto:erlang-questions@REDACTED>
> >http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
One suggestion is that it would be nice to not have to parse a string to get the version or the constraint from the entry.  So, keeping the application name as an atom and the version as a string, the relational operator could be done as an atom:
http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/app.html example of "kernel-3.0" becomes {kernel, '>=', "3.0"}
If the normal relational operators are handled like atoms, it seems like this would become explicit and easier to use (no extra parsing required).  This is similar to what was in the older email thread, but keeps the version separate from the relational operator.

It would be nice to clarify whether it is an error for 'runtime_dependencies' to provide a constraint for an application that is not a dependency listed in either 'included_applications' or 'applications'.  It seems like it should be limited to providing constraints on its dependencies (when considering the whole tree of dependencies for that particular application), since otherwise it could impact unrelated applications with invalid constraints.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20140718/1ccb5f67/attachment.htm>