Re: heads up - BEAM ports purge in PR263694

On Wed, 15 Jun 2022, at 02:14, Dewayne wrote:
>> If you have any ports you'd like to keep, please let me know here:
>>
>> https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=263694
>
> Dave,
> I started this email asking how will a newbie to FreeBSD and Erlang
> discover applications that are known to work on FreeBSD, and what the
> "mix tools" were, that you'd mentioned.

Thanks for the reply Dewayne!

Bearing in mind that I'm an erlang user now for ~ 12 years, well before
rebar* and elixir came along, is it even possible to reach for erlang
these days and *not* run into rebar3? I’m in too deep to know.

Would somebody who installs lang/rust need to be told what cargo is?
Should the OS package manager tell rubyists  about gem & bundler?

I've not run into anybody *not* using rebar & mix in more than 8 years.
Don't get me wrong, it's totally legit, just rather uncommon :-)

We could add something similar to lang/ruby:

https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/tree/lang/ruby32/pkg-message

> I do use
> erlang-epgsql       4.1.0 -> 4.6.0
> erlang-gen_smtp     0.1.3 -> 1.2.0  ***
> erlang-jobs         0.7.2 -> 0.10.0
> erlang-lager_syslog 3.0.3 -> 3.1.1
> erlang-cowboy       1.1.2 -> 2.9.0  ***

NB the above versions are extracted from:

https://portscout.freebsd.org/erlang@freebsd.org.html

Other than cowboy & gen_smtp, these are trivial version bumps from
the user's perspective. You can expect significant changes when
switching to cowboy 2.x though and ranch will change for gen_smtp
as well as cowboy.

Can you clarify a bit more how you use them? Off-list is fine.

If this is a common use case we should accommodate it, but if it's
special snowflake territory then I'd prefer I spend 30m helping
you get started on rebar, or working together on updating these
ports, than an ongoing maintenance burden in ports just for the
sake of it.

<hint>
In general its no problem to keep these & maintain them - if somebody
is using and willing to test them. I'd be more open to keeping them
onboard if there were willing contributors.
</hint>

> Perhaps we could reference these two sites as part of an Erlang
> installation message or in the long description to assist those new to
> the ports system, and provide some guidance?

that is a good idea, I will do it alongside these changes.

A+
Dave
—
O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention!