Hi Simon, On Wed, 25 Jun 2014 11:55:33 +0100 Simon MacMullen <si...@rabbitmq.com> wrote: > On 25/06/14 10:21, Sergei Golovan wrote: > > I think that installing erlang-cowboy into the system-wide Erlang > > directory is fine. > > If an application needs cowboy then it can either > > > > 1) ensure it works wit a system-wide version and depend on erlang-cowboy, or > > This would be tremendously painful since the API of cowboy undergoes > frequent incompatible changes. This is true for many C libraries as well. The process of upgrading libraries involves coordination with reverse dependencies and if any Debian package depended on on erlang-cowboy, their maintainers had been notified for API bumps.
$ apt-cache rdepends erlang-cowboy erlang-cowboy Reverse Depends: erlang-cowboy-examples > > > 2) include its own version and make sure that it's the one which is used > > (add -pa option to erl or otherwise). > > We load the code dynamically, so -pa won't work. We may be able to > change our code loading strategy though. There is also ErlSvc, which may or may not help in maintaining the version of Erlang applications used: https://packages.qa.debian.org/e/erlsvc.html > > > I'd prefer that this local cowboy wasn't > > easily accessible by other Erlang applications (god knows which local > > changes > > it has). > > Believe me, we do not add it to a path that any other application could > pick up. > > > Anyway, placing applications from regular Debian packages into > > /usr/lib/erlang > > shouldn't be considered a bug. > > Well, if that's the decision then fair enough. For most other languages > though it seems to be policy that the language's standard library goes > in a different place from any other random packages; I assumed that was > the default. I will happily adapt to any scheme for Debian's Erlang packages, but I think erlang-cowboy is packaged properly according to the current scheme. Note that erlang-cowboy does not change in stable and you can always stick to one particular package version on your production system if you don't want changes in testing/unstable: echo "package hold" | sudo dpkg --set-selections Cheers, Balint
