[erlang-questions] A Generic API for controlling software components

[Garrett Smith]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 3:50 PM, Jayson Vantuyl <kagato@REDACTED> wrote:

> If you want to deprecate applications, that's fine, but understand that two packaging / distribution formats is a horrible idea.  It took forever in Python to unify eggs and setuptools.

I'd heartily second this. Python still doesn't have a unified
packaging schema/toolset -- distutils and setuptools are still both in
mainstream use, and it's a total pain.

I've done a fair amount of work in package management systems in the
commercial/proprietary work. I've never seen a packaging scheme that
didn't have some pretty annoying warts. This tends to lead to package
manager proliferation as it's very tempting to start anew on this
common problem. Unfortunately, what initially looks like not-a-wheel
is probably just another wheel.

Unfortunately, I can only hand wave as I don't have a deep
understanding of Erlang's current application/release scheme (though I
have managed to used it :) I do think there's a reasonable burden to
demonstrate why Erlang's application abstraction can't be evolved to
support Python Egg or Ruby Gem like features. If the application
scheme doesn't work, could application be morphed into components, or
packages (also a common term for this)?

Is there something from Faxien that gets us closer to Joe's goal?

http://code.google.com/p/faxien/

Garrett