[rabbitmq-discuss] Generating a Rabbitmq release

[Matthew Sackman]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 09:48:04AM -0600, Jason J. W. Williams wrote:
> Personally I think a Mac .pkg would be incredibly beneficial to
> regular developers (college students' needs are a side benefit I
> think). Homebrew is only slightly less terrible than Macports as a
> packaging system and there are a ton of devs using OS X as their dev
> environment using neither as a result.
> 
> So it seems to me to be a leg up in an evaluation fight against
> ActiveMQ, Redis, etc., for Rabbit to have a .pkg installer that drops
> in the whole kit and kaboodle so the user can get started evaling it's
> features, and a good thing overall.

I can definitely see how it would help, and that it would solve this
problem. However, it may introduce other problems. For example, if we
have a package with an erlang distribution in it, what happens if it's
used on a system which already has a system-wide erlang distribution? If
we produce such an .pkg, and so does ejabberd, and so does riak, and a
dev wants to use all three on the same machine, at the same time, how do
they go about doing that? What happens if each of those packages ships a
different version of Erlang? Do you try and get the different nodes to
talk to each other etc etc?

I can imagine we might end up producing such a thing. And it might very
well help a number of users, and that is a good thing. But it probably
will introduce problems which package managers were invented to solve.
Again, the lack of sane package managers on certain platforms is the
problem and everyone who tries to write software for those platforms
ends up having to deal with these issues, which diverts developer effort
from fixing bugs, or adding features. Sigh.

Matthew