[erlang-questions] distributerl-0.1 (with improved Merkle trees)

[Justin Sheehy]

Hello All,

(erlang-questions is on the CC list because there was interest in this topic
before and I do not know of a general announcement list for such things)

This is the second release of distributerl. The first had no version number,
and was mainly intended to get the code into the hands of other potential
users and experimenters as quickly as possible -- motivated by requests for
such code by projects including but not limited to the Kai project. The
distributerl-0.1 release is driven by two improvements to the Merkle Tree
module:

   1. User-specified keys for objects are now arbitrary terms
      instead of being restricted to 160b binaries.
   2. A bug that caused incorrect diff/2 results has been fixed.

Due to item #2, any systems making use of merkerl.erl should upgrade.

A couple of smaller handy features were also added:

   1. New function merkerl:delete/2 means that items can be
      deleted from trees.
   2. New function merkerl:allkeys/1 will return the keys for
      all objects in a tree.

(The vclock and chash modules are unchanged in this release)

Future releases will include generic versioned objects, gossip protocol, and
proper packaging of the modules.

The project can be found at http://code.google.com/p/distributerl/

If you have any thoughts or questions about this, just drop me a line.

Cheers,

-Justin