I had a dread

[Joe Armstrong (AL/EAB)]

Mickaël Rémond wrote
> Le 1 sept. 05 à 20:25, Eric Merritt a écrit :
> 
> > Even with the availability of REPOS, Joe has a point. There is a bit
> > of magic in being able to apt-get 'erlangish-foo' that you 
> just can't
> > get when you have to do something manually. I think that 
> erlmerge is a
> > huge step down this path, even though right now there only 
> seems to be
> > a couple of packages available and no ability to erlmerge update to
> > the erlang distro.
> >  In general I think it would be great to have erlmerge and apt
> > integrated, but at the very least it would be nice to have 
> erlmerge in
> > apt so that you could do an 'apt-get erlmerge' and then 'erlmerge
> > erlangish-foo'. Its not optimal, but its a big step in the right
> > direction.
> 
> The main problem is that each distro has its own tool: apt-get,  
> urpmi, yum, yast, emerge, and so on.
> erlmerge is a step is a good directory as it sits on top of the  
> system package manage. This is what Perl is doing with CPAN.
> Distribution providers have to support base Erlang module and the  
> other ones are supported by an Erlang native tool.

YES

What I was suggesting is a wrapper for (say) apt-get - so that once you
have made your emerge package XX you
evauate the magic function wrapit(apt, debian , "XX") and it automatically produces a
debian apt package.

> One problem remains and is non trivial: how to support Erlang  
> application that rely on binary modules ?
> This is even less trivial when you have a multiplatform environment  
> like Erlang that run on various operating systems: Linux, 
> *BSD, *Nix,  
> Windows, MacOSX.

Difficult - but there is a large set of applications for which this is not a problem
ie the "pure erlang" sub-set.

/Joe

> 
> What we are doing with REPOS is a hard job a precompiling all the  
> native stuff, to have everything for all platforms (not all but as  
> many as we can) ?
> This is not perfect at all, but is also a good start. Maybe merging  
> REPOS effort with Erlmerge could lead to interesting and practical  
> results.
> 
> -- 
> Mickaël Rémond
> 
> 
> 
>