On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 8:58 PM, Ilya Khlopotov <iil...@ca.ibm.com> wrote:
> > Is there a way to publish an Erlang module for downstream users > independently of git? If yes, we could move back to a single-git-tree > model for > CouchDB, but we can still release parts as independent modules. I know > there have > been a few attempts at Erlang package managers, but has anything taken off? > > There is https://hex.pm/. It is for erlang and elixir based projects and > has 917 packages currently. > However for whatever reason erlang community wants to implement their own > and failed so far. > Surely there is a system which people know, which works, and which is quite easy: Release tarballs of source code. This worked for most of the history of the free software community. Release tarballs satisfy both of Jan's requirements: 1. Separate code into different modules. 2. Make a module available to downstream users. The only thing I see missing (perhaps implicit in Jan's idea) is automatic dependency chasing. With tarballs, it is only a matter of reading the release notes and following up to download more packages. In the case of CouchDB, I do not think our dependency tree is very deep; so that might not be so bad. (Tarballs strike me as more or less equivalent to Git tags, it's just a different file transfer protocol, really.)
