[erlang-questions] Erlang compilation travails

[Garrett Smith]

On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 5:03 PM,  <lloyd@REDACTED> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've been working my way up the Erlang learning curve for several years now quite cheerfully--- coding, installing, compiling, uninstalling, etc. But over the past several days my attempts to install n2o/samples have thrown crash dumps at the very last stages of compilation.
>
> Thinking the problem may be an hardware, OS, or Erlang installation issue, I moved to another box running Debian Wheezy. But on this box installation of rebar fails in the ./bootstrap step.  Moved to second Debian box--- same issue.
>
> The only common denominator is and upgrade of Ubuntu to 14.04 on box one and installation of Erlang under kerl on all three boxes.
>
> Been at this all day trying to get to the root of the problem. Decided to go back to basics and COMPLETELY uninstall Erlang, rebar, and kerl from the first Debian box and reinstall Erlang and rebar from scratch.
>
> But here's the mystery:
>
> lloyd@REDACTED:~$ sudo apt-get --purge remove 'erlang*'
> lloyd@REDACTED:~$ sudo dpkg-query -l 'erlang*'
> dpkg-query: no packages found matching erlang*
> lloyd@REDACTED:~$ sudo dpkg-query -l kerl
> dpkg-query: no packages found matching kerl
> lloyd@REDACTED:~$ sudo dpkg-query -l rebar
> dpkg-query: no packages found matching rebar
> lloyd@REDACTED:~$ cd .kerl
> bash: cd: .kerl: No such file or directory
> lloyd@REDACTED:~$ whereis erlang
> erlang:
> lloyd@REDACTED:~$ whereis rebar
> rebar:
> lloyd@REDACTED:~$ whereis kerl
> kerl:
> lloyd@REDACTED:~$ cd /usr/local/bin
> lloyd@REDACTED:/usr/local/bin$ ls -l
> total 0
> lloyd@REDACTED:~$ cd ~
> lloyd@REDACTED:~$ erl
> Erlang/OTP 17 [erts-6.0] [source] [64-bit] [smp:2:2] [async-threads:10] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false]
>
> Eshell V6.0  (abort with ^G)
> 1>
>
> Yikes! After all that house-cleaning, erl still runs!
>
> So my question: In which dark corner of my directory tree is erl still lurking?
>
> Bonus question: Am I being a stupid dunderhead at somewhere along the line or my computers IPIO (Inate Perversion of Inanimate Objects) deamons?
>
> Help!

It may be a pointless sacrifice to the Gods of Superstition -- there
may in fact not be problem -- but lore has it that the system packages
for Erlang are notoriously fickle, especially where Erlang is split up
into dozens and dozens of dependent packages as they are for Ubuntu.

I personally would not spend a single minute troubleshooting a
problematic Ubuntu Erlang installation. Rather, I'd uninstall it and
compile Erlang from source and use that version via "sudo make
install". It takes a while, but I bet it takes a lot less time than
figuring out the Ubuntu problem.

This article from the nice folks at Basho will help you compile on Ubuntu:

http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/ops/building/installing/erlang/

But I could be wrong -- I'm just sayin' what I'd do here :)

Garrett