[erlang-questions] Why do people keep rebar binary in repos ?

[Anthony Molinaro]

One thing which might help adoption by systems packagers (ie, debian, ubuntu,
redhat, epel) is versioned releases.  The only tag right now on github is
'RELEASE-1' from 2009.  And you can download 'rebar' then ask it for it's
version but as I only see one rebar that either means, it doesn't change,
so I should build from source, or it changes frequently but is always
named the same thing (at which point I have no way to get back to an old
version if I need to).  For my current RPM I use at work, I 
checked out on a particular day, and used the day as my version number.
I also noted the id of the last commit and put that into my scripts
which recreate the RPM, so in case I ever need to rebuild it, I know
where I started.

Better would be if some form of semantic versioning were adopted and
things tagged, and the version as part of the download.  That way I could
see downloads like 'rebar-1.0.2', or 'rebar-1.5.0'.  Once it's downloaded
I can easily symlink 'rebar' to the appropriate version (or have multiple
versions installed if I needed to).

Anyway, I realize software is never "done", but it is useful for the
different packagers if lines are drawn in the sand every so often.

-Anthony

On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 04:08:23PM -0700, Dave Smith wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 3:51 PM, Konstantin Sorokin <kvs@REDACTED> wrote:
> > Hello!
> >
> > I noticed that a lot of people keep 'rebar' in their public repositories. I
> > wonder what may be the reason behind that ? I am coming from the C++ world
> > and for me it seems very strange like, say, keeping 'make' binary along with
> > the C++ sources.
> 
> Generally, this was something I (and the rebar team, generally)
> encouraged for reasons of adoption. Requiring someone to install a new
> (unknown) tool like rebar just to compile code is rarely a popular way
> to get a project bootstrapped. :) However, with the current adoption
> level, this is something I expect will start changing.
> 
> Yes, it is a little odd but it sure was handy. :)
> 
> D.
> 
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-- 
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Anthony Molinaro                           <anthonym@REDACTED>