Updating Erlang and Elixir ports

[Jean-Sébastien Pédron]

On 10/03/2021 02:22, Kim Shrier wrote:
> I was wondering if there is something that prevents us from
> updating the lang/erlang port from version 21 up to version 23?
> If so, is it something I could help with?

Hi!

I don't know what the policy is w.r.t. all lang/erlang* ports.

 From a developer PoV, I believe it would make FreeBSD more friendly if 
lang/erlang would always be the latest and greatest.

This could potentially break ports depending on lang/erlang because they 
might not work with the latest version. I think they should be fixed by 
pinning the right version of Erlang (taken from lang/erlang-runtime*). 
For example, net/rabbitmq is already using lang/erlang-runtime21 for 
build and at runtime.

I believe Elixir should be compiled with the oldest version of Erlang it 
supports: this would allow to use it with any versions of Erlang at runtime.

What do people thing?

> I see that there is a patch to update Elixir to 1.11.3.  Is there
> anything blocking this update that I could help with?

I don't know the Elixir world, so I can't comment on this particular 
update. But as we only have a single unversioned port, I guess the 
update depends on what other ports using it accept.

-- 
Jean-Sébastien Pédron
The FreeBSD Project