[erlang-questions] Erlang release names and versions

[Michael Truog]

If you are doing this from scratch it should be much easier to use rebar for building the release:
https://github.com/basho/rebar

Otherwise, most older projects use to use shell scripts combined with erlang source code to build releases, and much of that was custom ad-hoc source code.  So, that is good to avoid.

On 09/12/2011 10:17 PM, Sam Bobroff wrote:
> Hi Erlangers,
> I'm trying to package up some Erlang projects for distribution,
> possibly by creating Releases, and I'm getting quite confused. I'd
> like to do it the "correct" way because we may want to use
> release_handler to perform upgrades.
>
> Maybe someone can help me out :-)
>
> The documentation for Releases
> (http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/release_structure.html)
> shows a sample directory structure produced by make_tar, which
> includes this part:
>
> releases/A/start.boot
> releases/ch_rel-1.rel
>
> Where ch_rel-1 is the name of the release and A is the version of the release.
>
> Question 1: If the release file is placed in releases/ch_rel-1.rel,
> then isn't installing a second version of the release (say, "B") going
> to overwrite the file? Isn't this a problem? Is the addition of "-1"
> to the release name supposed to address this? Shouldn't the release
> name appear somewhere in the path?
>
> Question 2: If another release, say "foo", is installed with the same
> version (say "A"), isn't it going to overwrite the start.boot file
> from release "ch_rel-1"?
>
> Question 3: Should I even be trying to install more than one release
> at once? Would I need a completely new Erlang install directory (or at
> least, releases directory, by using RELDIR)?
>
> (I have, incidentally, seen somewhere that the placement of the .rel
> file directly under releases/ by make_tar is a bug. Is this so? It
> certainly doesn't seem to match the structure created by
> create_target.)
>
> Thanks in advance for any help,
> Sam.
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