overview.edoc

@title Welcome to Sinan
@doc

<h1>Overview</h1>

<p>Sinan is our flagship build system. It is a build system designed expressly for
Erlang OTP projects. It simply will not work on projects that are not based on
the OTP principles. Fortunately, this shouldn't be too much of a problem because
you shouldn't really be writing significant Erlang applications without using
OTP.</p>

<p>By choosing to build only OTP projects we are able to make use of all that
wonderful OTP metadata. This allows us, in the vast majority of cases, to simply
'Do the Right Thing' while building a project. This approach allows us to build
a project with little or no input from the user. It also allows us to do a lot
of the grunt work of OTP automatically.</p>

<h1>Features</h1>

<p>As of this writing Sinan will do the following things for you.</p>

<ul>

<li>Manage dependencies</li>
<li>Retrieve packages to meet dependencies</li>
<li>Run Unit Tests and provide code coverage metrics</li>
<li>Warn about OTP layout and metadata issues</li>
<li>Compile Erlang files</li>
<li>Generate <code>*.rel</code> files</li>
<li>Generate <code>*.boot, *.script,</code> and other files required by the otp release
system</li>

<li>Run Dialyzer across all of the code in the project</li>
<li>Create a tar file that the OTP releases system understands and can use</li>
<li>Clean up after itself</li>
</ul>

<h1>Whats in a Name?</h1>

<p>I usually try to pick good googleable project names. This usually means that I
have to pick and arbitrary name and build meaning around it, since almost all of
the proper nouns that would fit a project are taken or already well represented
on the net. Since I had to pick a name for a build system I decided to use the
name of a famous architect or builder from history. There is no small number of
possible options. Unfortunately, many of them are already used for various open
source projects out there. In my searches for possible names, I came across
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinan">Ḳoca Mi‘mār Sinān Āġā</a> a famous builder
from the Ottoman Empire. He worked primarily in Istanbul. Well this caught my
attention. At one time Istanbul was Constantinople and before that Byzantium and
I have a certain fascination with Byzantine history. The fact that Sinan was a
brilliant architect just kind of sealed the deal. So what I ended up with is a
nice googleable name that is memorable and short enough to type on the command
line, also having an interesting historical meaning.</p>

@author Eric Merritt
@copyright 2007, 2008 Erlware