Support for non-unique process labels?

Fred Hebert mononcqc@REDACTED
Mon May 10 20:19:19 CEST 2021


On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 5:09 AM Nicolas Martyanoff <khaelin@REDACTED>
wrote:

>
> So they do not unless you use an external tool; which will also force me
> to write a custom rebar3 plugin (which is another can of worms).
>
> Thank you for the link though, I'll give it a try.
>

So there's a long-term plan to fold Rebar3 stuff into OTP, but the true
easy underlying problem there is that we'd have to re-license a lot of
code, or otherwise rewrite it to align the licenses with what would fit
into OTP. Furthermore, the two maintainers (myself included) have limited
time for it and haven't had it as part of work duties for the last 3-4
years or so.

In short, the sort of things that would improve that tooling would come
down to "large corporations decide to adopt public projects or replace them
and pay for commercial-level support of Erlang/OTP." Until then, a lot of
the things you see as necessary require either a much larger community, or
for some larger group of people to foot the bill so that the
externalization that has taken place is covered for you.

Until then these sorts of demands unfortunately fall in "whatever free time
the 1-3 people maintaining a subset of the code have to give to random
people", and that time has drastically shrunk across the board (not just
rebar3/relx) with the pandemic and whatnot, and priority is given to
breaking bugs for existing users rather than major refactors for the sake
of future convenience.

The level of support a language like Go (or Rust) would see hardly happens
with something like Erlang, where Ericsson does provide *a lot* of
significant improvements, but the community is historically closer to a
bunch of commercial actors working on their stuff, with 2-3 more
public-facing companies doing some work and releasing it from time to time.

Until a bunch of people feel they'll get a well-paying job through the
visibility of improving the ecosystem, I get the feeling it will be a lot
harder to just get tons of volunteer work on tooling like that, where year
after year, the comments (as seen in this thread) are that whatever you do
just sucks too much and why don't you have the power of google thrown at it
instead. You get used to it, but it's not attractive work.

Regards,
Fred.
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