Thanks for your comments.
- We are pairing down the installation procedure. We couldn't do everything we wanted before we did our first release.
- The compiler was changed from upstream. We are in the process of getting back onto mainline ponyc. That should be happening in the next couple weeks at which point, we will be taking the first step in pairing down the instructions. When we were first developing Wallaroo, we wanted to be able to rapidly evolve the Pony runtime as well as Wallaroo itself. To do that, we needed to fork the project. We've gotten almost all of our changes back into the mainline ponyc.
- It works on other distributions. We currently only provide instructions for Trusty and Xenial because as you said, it's a somewhat involved process at the moment that we are working on simplifying.
- We went back and forth on if we should use docker for the UI. Its written in Elixir and requires that Erlang be installed. After working with some clients, we decided it was easier to provide a docker container.
2. How does Wallaroo differ from just running bunch of AMQP clients for data processing? And I ask this as somebody who's in the middle of writing his own stream processing engine.
And a few comments:
- Installation procedure is so unnecessarily long. It would be much shorter if you provided source package and not require anything from outside of the distribution.
- Installation procedure involves downloading Pony compiler from non-canonical source. It's a warning of sorts. I don't know if the compiler source was changed from the upstream, so I'm wary about Wallaroo's compilation with official Pony compiler.
- Installation procedure only ever mentions Ubuntu. You do know that people run other distributions, right? Does Wallaroo even compile under Debian or CentOS, or was it written for Ubuntu specifically?
- Requiring Docker to run examples is bad. Your software should be easy to run without garbage from containers.