non-trivial supervisor idioms?

[Steve Davis]

Hi Dan,

Just some of my experiences that may help... I faced much the same
issue(s), and also I wanted to keep application:start(myapp) and
myapp:start() synonymous. I finalized on doing the startup validation
in the app's start() function, then started the main supervisor only
when the initialization/validation was completed. I defined mnesia/
crypto and other dependencies as included apps and started their own
sups under the main app sup (as recommended
http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/included_applications.html).
I experimented with start phases, but ran into issues when a phase
failed during startup (http://www.erlang.org/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?2:mss:
1771:201003:maambghdccechjinphpl), so I abandoned that approach.

Regards,
/s