Thanks Russell for this well-founded writeup! This really helps a lot in understanding that matter. Your suggestion of making specific recommendations regarding certain combinations of CouchDB and Erlang/OTP sounds reasonable in that context.
> The narrowness of the acceptable releases list is going to cause some > problems. Debian Wheezy runs R15B01, which as established above, is > not good to run with unless you have the `+sfwi` patch, and I'm sure > there are many other distros running R15 and R16B or R16B01. I think > it would be useful to users to have a set of packages with a proper > Erlang CouchDB release allowing us to bless specific versions of > Erlang and bundle it together, but I know this idea goes against the > recent change in stance on working with distributions, and I don't > know the ASF stance on this issue well enough to comment on the > legality of it. That said, it does seem like the logical approach > until we get a range of stable releases spread out through the > distros. We already do provide binary packages with Erlang/OTP and CouchDB bundled together (see http://couchdb.apache.org/#download) :) Speaking of proper CouchDB OTP-releases: I don't see any conflict (or potential conflict) regarding "the recent change in stance on working with distributions". We can both have OTP-releases (finally having them will be great after all), while still being supportive of distributors when they want to create their own distribution-specific package.
