Why Repos ?
Erlang community is very active and very dynamic. It has produced major pieces of software and many of them can become killer-apps. However, those jewels are not always very well know by developpers outside the Erlang community. Installing Erlang and the needed software can be intimidating for people that do not already know Erlang. REPOS is a way to allow people to easily try out a great number of Erlang software.
Moreover, Erlang being a distributed environment, it is usefull to have a quickly installable set of pre-installed Erlang software. This is needed to simply add new nodes in an Erlang cluster.
As Erlang is a fastly expanding software development environment that is for example included in Debian. However, it is not yet always installed or included on every computers. REPOS is thus handy to installed a complete featurefull Erlang environment by simply copying a directory structure to the developer hard-drive. REPOS can even be used directly from the CDROM.
What can REPOS environment be used for ?
REPOS environment can be used:
- for Erlang/OTP evaluation
- for Erlang-based software evaluation
- as a mobile complete Erlang environment (works directly from the CDROM or from a USB key)
- as a tool to set-up Erlang-based clusters without having to install anything on the target computers
- as an easy installer for a complete Erlang environment (both for use of Erlang software and development)
Why is REPOS not a "LiveCD" ?
LiveCD are great for testing operating system. However, LiveCD distributing complete software environment are emerging. We feels that this trend does not make sense for software environment like Erlang based distribution, as user always as an existing operating system on its computer. So, liveCDs are most of the time try-once systems. This is a great effort for something that is most of the time used only once. This is why we think that it is most valuable to provide the user with an environment that runs on an existing operating system. REPOS works both directly from the CDROM, as an evaluation tool, and can be dropped on the user hard-drive as a fastly installed complete and stand-alone Erlang environment. REPOS is multi-platform and work whatever the user operating system is. For now we only are only supporting Linux and Microsoft Windows, but we are planning to extend this support to other oerating systems.
Included software
This Erlang software repository gathers fully functional pre-installed and configured Erlang software. This repository is multi-platform and currently supports Linux, Windows, MacOSX and DarwinPPC.
Currently, the included software are:
- Erlang/OTP R9C-2
- EDoc 0.4
- EUnit 1.0
- Syntax_tools 1.3
- XMerl 0.19
- Yaws 1.49
- Ejabberd CVS 2004-09-30
- Tsunami 1.0
- Wings 3D 0.98
- Erlang SDL 0.94 (graphical library)
REPOS command
When running start.sh or start.bat (or letting autorun feature do the job for you), you reach an Erlang shell. You can check that REPOS is working properly by running the test suite with: repos:check().
You can test several pre-configured software that should work out-of-the-box:
- Yaws (connect with http://localhost:6080/ or http://localhost:6080/~user/): repos:start(yaws).
- Ejabberd (connect with a Jabber client to create accounts): repos:start(ejabberd).
- Wings3D: repos:start(wings).
Your feedback is highly welcome to test the CDROM on various architecture and computers !!
Distribution
REPOS Erlang environment is distributed as a compressed iso image.
You can download the REPOS Erlang environment ISO, decompress it (Bzip2) and then
record the resulting CD image on ISO. |
