Sunday, February 24, 2008

Erlang and Automake

There were some inquiries on the erlang-questions mailing list recently about using Gnu Automake with Erlang. That reminded me to release a build system we've been using for development.

My fascination with build systems predates my obsession with Erlang so it is more general than just Erlang. It is organized around project templates, and there is Erlang project template that has been getting pretty well developed. Every time we figure out a new best practice around Erlang development we incorporate it into the template so that all of our projects benefit. So for instance now we have cover integration, eunit integration, and edoc integration.

It is now available on google code.

5 comments:

Bro' said...

You beat me to delivering an Erlang project framework by a matter of days.

http://code.google.com/p/erlang-t-build/

Talk of coincidence!

Unknown said...

where do you get fw-bootstrap to install this build system?

Bro' said...

Hi Goku,

The erlang-t-build build 'framework' is not related to 'Framewerk'. Sorry my choice of words is causing confusion.

T-Build doesn't rely on Autotools or Automake. I'm knocking on the door here because I may learn something here about that. Although, the targets T-Build aims at are usually Unix flavour (Linux,Solaris,MacOSX), and bash+make seen to deal with those quite well without resorting to Autotools and Automake.

I spent a lot of time creating T-Build, and only recently I've seen other projects such as Framewerk and Faxien+Sinan approach some degree of maturity. There's obviously a need for project build tools in Erlang, and a lot of people, such as you and I have been scratching the same itch.

Paul Mineiro said...

goku: instructions for building framework are available on google code at the wiki section

Paul Mineiro said...

bro': well this itch of mine way predates erlang, and this colors some of the design choices.

The more approaches the better! As long as everybody feels free to steal the good ideas from each other :)