A Joeish Erlang distribution (long)

[Mickael Remond]

* Joakim G. <jocke@REDACTED> [2003-01-27 10:24:30 +0100]:

> Hi all,
> After recent discussions on this list and after the work with the
> xmlrpc library I have come to a conclusion:
> 
> Erlang is ready for an alternative distribution.

This is strange because this idea converge with something I had in mind.
I was looking for a good way to integrate contributed modules into an
Erlang installation.

One approach that has been successfull for Perl is to have some kind of
interface to an Erlang repository. For Perl this kind of tool is call
CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network). The main idea is that you get
a way to quickly download, compile a given module and all its
dependency. CPAN.org has a website but the easiest access to the
repository is through the dedicated Perl client that handles the
dependancy, recompilation and installation part).

I think we could build this kind of network on top of RPM. The main
drawback is that this is Linux only. I think it is important to have
such a front-end in Erlang, so that it can work on others Unixes and
Windows.

I think this approach could be more scalable (I mean easily integrate
more man power) that managing an Erlang distribution.

What do you think ?

-- 
Mickaël Rémond