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.
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.
As of this writing Sinan will do the following things for you.
*.rel files*.boot, *.script, and other files required by the otp release
systemI 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 Ḳoca Mi‘mār Sinān Āġā 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.