#1 Suggested feature: Download erlang distribution as depency?

[Anonymous]

This is a great plugin, but why not take it a step further?

Could the plugin not in fact follow the Maven philosophy of resolving dependencies to its logical endpoint and in fact download the Erlang distribution (for the invoked platform) as well?

The maven flex mojos plugin does this, for example. With it, it's not necessary to have Flex Builder, etc. installed, Maven takes care of everything.

This would make it easier for Erlang to "infiltrate" into shops that are currently "Java only"...

[Olivier Sambourg]

We're currently looking into it. The problem is finding an Erlang repository both complete and up to date. CEAN (http://cean.process-one.net/) is a pretty good candidate for that.

[Guenther Enthaler]

I'm not sure that's what adamselene is getting at; sounds to me more like the erlang distros themselves, packaged as Maven dependencies. It'd be easy enough to do, since Maven knows where the local repository lives and the maven-erlang plugin could therefore easily obtain a path to the Erlang erl/erlc binaries. It would also make it somewhat easier to package applications as standalone bundles. More difficult might be licensing, bandwidth. I'm not sure that the standard Maven2 repo at http://repo1.maven.org/maven2 would be too happy about 60+MB artifacts. There's also the tedium of packaging the distro into the right format each time a new Erlang release comes out (although this could be scripted fairly easily).