Updating Erlang and Elixir ports

[Dave Cottlehuber]

On Wed, 10 Mar 2021, at 23:11, Jean-Sébastien Pédron wrote:
> 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 Kim,

There are ~ 70 dependent ports which require Elixir:

https://www.freshports.org/lang/elixir -> Dependencies

These need to be tested, and either updated, patched, or deprecated
from ports, to accomodate a new Elixir version. This is pretty much the
same process for any compiler in FreeBSD ports.

I looked into net/rabbitmq back in December:

https://reviews.freebsd.org/D27532

A number of the boot scripts for RabbitMQ changes, and while J-S gave
me some tips, I've not had the time/motivation to finish it... life under
COVID is heavily dependent on whether there are 3 kids at home
during the day or not, and it turned out not to be a simple fix that fitted
in my free time.

I will revisit my rabbitmq patches this evening and update it as far as
I can, now that 3.8.14 is out it might be simpler.

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

+1

> 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.

Ditto for databases/couchdb*.

> 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 think?

I'd rather see Elixir running against lang/erlang (default). People who 
desperately need newer elixir + older erlang can install their own elixir
tarball, its not hard, or just use ports and not upgrade.

> > 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?

Checking dependencies and helping out would be awesome!

If you need help with getting started, I'm happy to help you.
 
A+
Dave