Building Erlang/OTP with kerl on cygwin, Configure failed

Question

I'm trying to Build Erlang on Cygwin using kerl. It downloads the release, verifies checksum, starts building and gives me a configure error:

Sergey@PackardBell /cygdrive/c/kerl
$ ./kerl build R16B03-1 R16B03-1
Verifying archive checksum...
Checksum verified (e5ece977375197338c1b93b3d88514f8)
Building Erlang/OTP R16B03-1 (R16B03-1), please wait...
Configure failed.
Building for windows, you should do the  following first:
eval `./otp_build env_win32`
please note that there are backticks (``) in the command

And running the eval command does nothing since I don't have those directories, just gives me:

-bash: ./otp_build: No such file or directory

What am I missing here?

Answer 1

Kerl 1.3.2 doesn't have support for Windows. Some version of Erlang/OTP might just work under Windows, or it might work if your system looks a certain way, but the error you're getting is from the Erlang build script.

I'd look at the Kerl code here https://github.com/kerl/kerl/blob/1.3.2/kerl#L509

There's some special handling for Darwin systems, and there should probably be some special handling for Windows to have it run otp_build env_win32 before configuring.

Also, consider trying with a newer version because you'll have a harder time getting help and support for a version that's 3 major releases behind current.