[erlang-questions] Build Systems and a C Problem with fd_server

[Christopher Covington]

Hi,
I've got a general question and a very specific one.

I'm trying to build a repository of useful Erlang packages for
Gentoo[1] and would like to include fd_server because yaws depends on
it. I still don't understand the motivation behind erlmerge. Perhaps
it's really something useful but at first glance it doesn't seem to
fit so very well with Gentoo's Portage package management system. I
haven't gotten around to investigating CEAN yet. With the proper
supporting bash scripting it may be possible to include basically all
packages in jungerl or CEAN into portage. Similar efforts, i.e. for
CPAN, have always seemed a little funky to me though. Rubygems play
really nicely with portage however and so such a build system would be
great IMO. Autotools is very well supported everywhere, and especially
on Gentoo. It seems the best option for large, mature packages, but
then again is perhaps not really the greatest for smaller apps (like
fd_server). I'd like to investigate sinan. I gather scons erlang is on
the road to deprecation. I've read that Maven doesn't mix very well
with Gentoo. What build systems do you guys think are best for Erlang
and should there be an effort to repackage existing code with better
systems?

Anyhow In an attempt to imitate Romain Lenget's autotoolization of
gtknode, I've come to a stumbling block that I don't think I can get
past on my own. I don't know C well enough. The problem is:

fdlib.c: In function 'send_fd':
fdlib.c:174: error: 'struct msghdr' has no member named 'msg_accrights'
fdlib.c:175: error: 'struct msghdr' has no member named 'msg_accrightslen'

The code causing the error is surrounded by a bunch of #ifdef stuff.

It can be reproduced by running "./configure && make" inside the
tarball I have posted on my google project page[2].

I'm not an expert with Automake and company--I just ran autoscan for
the C code parts, tried to follow relevant parts of the manual, ripped
off gtknode's files and did a whole lot of googling. If anyone can
offer criticism of my Autotools usage I'd love it, and the stuff
(configure.ac, Makefile.in's) more or less works, so perhaps its
worthy of a look at for those curious and interested in using
Autotools for their own code.

Many thanks,
Chris

1. http://code.google.com/p/gentoo-erlay/
2. http://code.google.com/p/gentoo-erlay/downloads/list