Build/run RabbitMQ with self-contained ERTS?

In master we have some significant changes that make RabbitMQ almost a standard OTP app, with a chance of making it more or less standard a bit later. We expect to backport those to 3.8 at some point (we offer no ETA).

To my knowledge you are the second person to ask for this.

Reasons not to do it include: 99.9% of RabbitMQ users do not run custom Erlang apps and (for reasons that are not rational in anyway)

know nothing or virtually nothing about Erlang. Another reason: once you tie a RabbitMQ release to an Erlang release, you are forever linked

to all the issues in that Erlang release which can *only* be mediated by upgrading RabbitMQ. As upgrades have become significantly easier and better

documented in the last year, this is less of a convincing argument but we likely won’t distribute RabbitMQ as an OTP release any time soon.

Finally, FWIW many begin to ship their software exclusively in containers. Whether that makes sense for stateful data services is for another discussion

but it does mean that there often won’t be any Erlang version conflicts as every app or tightly linked group of apps get their own container anyway.