Chapter 2 Building Open Source Erlang Software
创建一个开源的Erlang软件(software)
Most Erlang books tend to explain how to build Erlang/OTP applications, but few of them go very much in depth about how to integrate with the Erlang community doing Open Source work.
Some of them even avoid the topic on purpose. This chapter dedicates itself to doing a quick tour of the state of affairs in Erlang.
OTP applications are the vast majority of the open source code people will encounter.
In fact, many people who would need to build an OTP release would do so as one umbrella OTP application.
大多数介绍Erlang的书都倾向于介绍怎样去创建Erlang/OTP applications，但鲜有更深入去介绍如何与Erlang社区集成做一些开源的工作(Open Source Work)。
他们中甚至有人故意回避这个主题。本章节致力示范下如何快速完成这些工作。
OTP applications是人们在绝大部分的开源代码中都会遇到的。
事实上，很多需要创建OTP release的人只是做一个伞形结构的OTP application。
If what you’re writing is a stand-alone piece of code that could be used by someone building a product, it’s likely an OTP application. If what you’re building is a product that stands on its own and should be deployed by users as-is (or with a little configuration), what you should be building is an OTP release. 1
The main build tools supported are rebar and erlang.mk. The former is a portable Erlang script that will be used to wrap around a lot of standard functionality and add its own, while the latter is a very fancy makefile that does a bit less, but tends to be faster when it comes to compiling.
In this chapter, I’ll mostly focus on using rebar to build things, given it’s the ad-hoc standard, is well-established, and erlang.mk applications tend to also be supported by rebar as dependencies.
如果你正在写一个独立代码库(供给别人创建产品，产品组成的某部分)，最好是写成OTP application。 如果你创建的代码(product)全部基于自己本身(stands on its own)并提供给用户部署的，你应该创建的是一个OTP release。
最主要的构建工具是rebar 和erlang.mk. rebar是一个附带许多标准功能的便携Erlang脚本,erlang.mk则是一个很小但却可以是非常快编译文件的神奇makefile 文件。
在本章节中，我会重点于怎样使用rebar高效地创建符合标准的结构，rebar也支持erlank.mk 的application。
[1]The details of how to build an OTP application or release is left up to the Erlang introduction book you have at hand.
[注1]：关于如何创建一个OTP application 或OTP release，你可以查阅其它介绍Erlang的书籍。