Longstanding issues: structs & standalone Erlang

[Vlad Dumitrescu XX (LN/EAB)]

> -----Original Message-----
> [mailto:owner-erlang-questions@REDACTED] On Behalf Of Romain Lenglet
> For instance, Vlad Dumitrescu's proposal to bury packaging / 
> installation code deep inside the implementation or Erlang is 
> a bad idea for that reason: it would have to be patched / 
> disabled on every platform that has a packaging system, to 
> avoid it to interfere with the platform-managed packages.

I would like to make apoint again about my suggestion earlier, because I
feel most people are mixing two different issues here. This doesn't mean
that my idea can't be bad :-) but just that it feels it is
misinterpreted.

* One issue is general distribution of (third-party) applications and
libraries, with all the versioning hell that follows. This *not* what I
was referring to.

* The other is distribution of Erlang releases, so that only a minimal
archive has to be installed by default.

What I suggested was to take a release, say R5B-4, and replace most of
the library directories with a pointer to an URL where the content can
be fetched from. This URL could be hardcoded, so that only official
versions can be accessed. When the content is already present, it is
used as-is.

This means that one could just download the runtime + kernel + stdlib
(more or less). The rest would follow when needed.

Regards,
Vlad