ant, make and ermake

[Rick Pettit]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 02:09:29PM +0200, Dominic Williams wrote:
> Michael Fogeborg wrote:
> 
> >Is anyone working on the build/make process of erlang ?

OTP ships with Autotools and builds, no?

> >I.e. working on OS-independent ways of building erlang ?

OTP ships with Autotools and builds _on multiple platforms_, no?

> Do you mean building Erlang applications, or building 
> the Erlang/OTP system itself?

Both can be done with Autotools, though there is a learning curve involved.

We use Autotools to create source distributions of our application releases
and are quite pleased with it.

When it comes time to build a binary package out of your Autotools source
distfile there are autoconf macros out there:

  http://autoconf-archive.cryp.to/macros-by-category.html

which can build Linux RPMs automatically, for example (I have not personally
used them as we prefer NetBSD pkgsrc which itself ports to all sorts of OSes).

When working with NetBSD pkgsrc the distfile created by a 'gmake dist' plugs
right in.

> We are working on an open-source tool called XP Dojo 
> which, although it really has greater ambitions, 
> already automatically and continuously builds an Erlang 
> application. We are probably a few weeks away from the 
> first release, but it's an "outside working hours" 
> project, so don't hold your breath :(
> 
> In the future it will also do the same for C code.

For C code I would really urge someone to give Autotools a shot. A page long
Makefile can be reduced to just a handful of lines in Makefile.am and
configure.ac and will produce the most lovely, portable binaries.

We do that for building erl_interface/ei-based shared libraries (one of the
ways in which we integrate C/C++ applications with OTP).

Just my 2 cents.

-Rick