[erlang-questions] Erlang package manager

Judson Lester nyarly@REDACTED
Fri Jan 2 20:53:39 CET 2015


I'm really concerned to see NPM and Maven presented as anything like
options regarding a package manager. On the one hand, there's a significant
difference between a build tool (Maven, Ant) and a package manager. On the
other, NPM relies on a feature of Node (using a tree to look up
dependencies at runtime, rather than a path) that isn't present in Erlang
(and, in my opinion, shouldn't be.) NPM is also weak in terms of deployment
(shrinkwrap is a big hassle) - and still very young (witness the change in
behavior regarding semver.)

If Erlang were to emulate another packaging system, I'd recommend looking
at rubygems and bundler in the Ruby community. It's biggest failing is that
the two projects were started separately, and that there's a reliance on
outside projects to deal with changes in VM for development.

The strongest reason I can see to build an Erlang centric PM is to support
Erlang's existing deployment behaviors i.e. releases.

On Fri Jan 02 2015 at 11:34:53 AM Imants Cekusins <imantc@REDACTED> wrote:

> Is there really a need to try to compete with OS-specific or OS-agnostic
> PM's?
>
> For Erlang PM (which is being discussed here), why not limit the scope
> to erlang-only packages & deps?
>
> E.g., Java PM's (Ivy, Maven, Ant) focus on Java code, don't they?
>
> One of the key benefits of building / designating an "official" Erlang
> PM would be ease of use of | conversion from a variety of existing
> Erlang-specific PM's/build tools.
>
> In other words, "the Erlang PM" would install 90% of Erlang packages
> in the wild, or ideally from a central repository.
>
> ?
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