Difference between Elixir and Elixir-Dev in FreeBSD

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1

I read that installing Elixir in Freebsd 14 has 2 distinct such as :

  • Run: pkg install elixir or pkg install elixir-devel

What the different both of them?

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The wild-guess would be: as usually, the former is runtime and the latter is compiler+tools.

One should not in general use system libraries for erlang/elixir. Use asdf version manager or like.

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asdf currently not support in Freebsd Sir

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The binary packages come from the ports tree and usually the *-devel packages are more up-to-date with dependencies. The easiest way to check what’s the difference between elixir and elixir-devel is to check the port dependencies and/or applied patches. After a quick glance, it looks like elixir depends on Erlang 25 and elixir-devel on Erlang 27.

You can use the tools that FreeBSD provides to inspect information about installed or not installed packages, pkg info and pkg rquery respectively.

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5

It also looked like elixir was on the 1.16.3 version and elixir-devel was 1.17.2, too.

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6

My bad. I don’t know why I looked up only the Erlang version… Thanks for pointing out another difference.

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FreeBSD’s not linux, I 100% use the 2 main elixir flavours for production usage. They are very up to date, if anybody needs an older version, we can organise that. Just open a ticket at bugs.freebsd.org and I’ll get to it.

The main difference now is:

  • lang/elixir tracks stable elixir (1.16.x release), uses an older erlang release (lang/erlang which is OTP25.x presently)
  • lang/elixir-devel tracks latest elixir (1.17.x releases atm), and uses the latest OTP release lang/erlang-runtime27 available thats compatible)

There are 2 distinct package repositories available on FreeBSD. The default quarterly is taken from the faster-moving latest every quarter, and gets security fixes only backported to it.

the latest one is YOLO arch-style, updated very frequently, in line with OTP & Elixir updates. That said, we use it in production and I’ve not had any issues in years. It depends on your appetite for stability vs up-to-date-ness.

asdf should be available soon on FreeBSD, there’s patches for it ready atm, or you can use sysutils/mise which is already present. RIIR its nice and fast.

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