[erlang-questions] Customizing Beam Build

[Tristan Sloughter]

> There are not issue to package Erlang release to tarball and then to
> self-extractable archive. This is what I am doing on daily basic. I am
> trying to understand why community rejects this approach and targets
> some complex tooling? Is this because of Windows platform support or
> escripts? Or something else?
escripts are a separate use case. And not working on Windows is
certainly limiting but I doubt it is why the pattern isn't used much.
Personally I just use containers these days, so no real need for
building self-extractable archives, and this is probably the case of
many now. Plus the fact that unpacking a tarball and running
`bin/<script>` isn't that much more work :). And of course, none of
this works with release upgrades or sharing libs between releases to
save space.
That said, I meant to also put an example:

rebar3 as prod release

cd _build/prod/rel/<release name>

makeself --bzip2 ./ <release name> "Description" ./bin/<release name>

And then you can just do:

./<release name> console

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