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diff --git a/doc/src/guide/history.asciidoc b/doc/src/guide/history.asciidoc index 41eec09..9202743 100644 --- a/doc/src/guide/history.asciidoc +++ b/doc/src/guide/history.asciidoc @@ -1,5 +1,66 @@ +[[history]] == Short history -// @todo Write it. +This chapter aims to be a brief record of the life of the +Erlang.mk project. -Placeholder chapter. +=== Before Erlang.mk + +Erlang.mk originates from the Cowboy project. Cowboy started +as a Rebar project and I, Loïc Hoguin, was very happy with it +for a couple years. Over time however I started getting annoyed +and frustrated by a number of things, including bad defaults, +changing defaults and overall slowness. + +In particular, at the time I gave up on Rebar, the Cowboy +test suite was taking about five minutes to run. A quick experiment +showed I could get much lower times by simply invoking `ct_run` +directly. On January 4th, 2013, the Cowboy test suite took less +than a minute to complete. + +Following this success I started removing a little more and, +on the fateful day of January 5th, 2013, removed the dependency +on Rebar entirely. Rebar, and in particular the concept of +dependencies, was, and still is, a pretty strong influence. + +Erlang.mk was conceived. + +A few months passed and, on May 1st, 2013, the Erlang.mk +repository was created. Erlang.mk was born. + +Little did I know how much it would grow. + +=== Lifetime of the project + +Erlang.mk would eventually become a much larger file able to +deal with many more projects than just Cowboy. From the birth +of the project, the biggest force for growth was user contributions, +because Erlang.mk appealed to a variety of people with different +needs, needs that Erlang.mk was not fulfilling yet. + +The project was split into smaller files focused on a different +feature each, and a build script was written to build the single +Erlang.mk file. + +A test suite was contributed by a user, and later taken as a basis +for the current, much more complete test suite. Turns out testing +a Makefile is pretty straightforward. + +A package index was added to solve the problem of discovering +Erlang projects. + +After trying to see if Erlang build tools could cooperate, the +decision was made to improve compatibility with existing Rebar +projects by patching Rebar out, using Rebar. This feature, called +autopatch, proved very successful and made Erlang.mk compatible +with more than 90% of all Erlang projects. + +Erlang.mk documentation was much improved and the Erlang.mk website +was created in the summer of 2015. + +Over the year of 2015, Erlang.mk went from curiosity to a serious +alternative to other Erlang build tools. The user base increased +immensely and large projects started using it, including RabbitMQ +from the 3.6.0 release onward. + +A bright future lies ahead. |