Mac OS builds for Erlang/OTP releases

[starbelly]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently Mac OS builds are not provided along with releases on github. This can be particularly problematic when it comes to CI. Specifically, AFAIK most of the community depends on brew to install erlang for Mac OS CI workflows and jobs.

This is sub-optimal as the brew method comes with a lot of dependencies, and as such has tendency to break.

Describe the solution you'd like

The OTP has workflows to test building of Erlang/OTP and uploads this artifact, as such I believe it would be possible to at least attach the tarball when the release is created. Github actions such as setup-beam could utilize this artifact to ease usage in CI for the ecosystem, and of course people could just download and unpack as needed.

Describe alternatives you've considered

It might be possible for parts of the community to take this on, but it feels quite natural per the above to keep it here.

Additional context

Examples of recent failed builds in the community :

rebar3
grisp toolchain

[paulo-ferraz-oliveira]

@starbelly, it's worth mentioning @wojtekmach's work, in #5723, so we're close 😄

And I feel the pain, both for rebar3 (updated CI recently to fix brew-related stuff: erlang/rebar3#2826) and setup-beam, too (specifically erlef/setup-beam#54).

[paulo-ferraz-oliveira]

As per what's mentioned in #5723, maybe one solution could be to poll erlang/otp, build the image and store it in GitHub, as a first step?

[starbelly]

As per what's mentioned in #5723, maybe one solution could be to poll erlang/otp, build the image and store it in GitHub, as a first step?

That's doable, if for some reason this is problematic here, that's definitely a viable alternative solution though. Thanks for calling it out!

[starbelly]

It's possible this should be closed as a duplicate. I totally forgot about that PR and the issue. Lukas's arguments against this are sound as well.