lfetool does not support freebsd

[jjl]

lfetool uses a /bin/bash shebang. On FreeBSD, bash is installed to /usr/bin/bash. Is there a reason not to use /usr/bin/env bash ?

[jjl]

Additionally it appears to hardcode calls to 'rebar' and 'make', which on freebsd should be 'rebar3' and 'gmake'. This is a little more difficult than using 'env' :/

[oubiwann]

Quick note -- lfetool is being phased out (we've even taken down the lfetool-based LFE Quick Start).

It was also never very thoroughly tested with rebar3, so if you do want to use it, I'd suggest only using it with rebar2.

Background info:

• Many of the features that lfetool was created to support have made their way into LFE-proper
• Others are now available as LFE rebar3 plugins
• Remaining features/commands that haven't been implemented in rebar3 tend to be the least-used ones ...

[oubiwann]

With regard to FreeBSD: one of the big motivations for moving to rebar3 was that changes made and tested on Linux systems would break the support that had been previously added for FreeBSD. Then, the changes that were being made (PRs, etc.) to lfetool to get FreeBSD working again would either break lfetool on Linux, Mac, or Windows. In other words, the work of providing a useful tool for LFE moved from a tooling focus to a cross-platform support focus -- a problem which has been fixed elsewhere and we were stuck in the position of having to reinvent bug-ridden wheels for the lfetool shell script :-/

All the major LFE libraries have now been updated to use rebar3, with lfetool support removed from them, so there should be fewer and fewer dependencies upon lfetool. If we find any, we tend to update the project (or submit a PR) to remove that dependency.

If there is a particular feature you really like having in lfetool that the LFE rebar3 plugins don't support yet, you can create a feature request. We take those very seriously in the LFE community :-) (All the latest work on lmug, clojang, etc., have been driven by user requests.)

If you're looking for someplace to get you introduced to how a "modern" LFE project uses rebar3, there's a blog post here.

Sorry there's not better news for lfetool -- but please let us know what we can do to make your rebar3 experience better!

[jjl]

That blog post is basically exactly what i was looking for. I was stumbling around and found lfetool and ltest points to it in the README. It would be really useful to update that.

Thanks!