I’m on Ubuntu Wily, and I was trying to install the erlang-dev package to use HTTPoison. The problem though was that APT wanted to downgrade Erlang to an older version (16.0), in order to resolve some conflicts. This was obviously undesirable, so I set out to investigate.

It turns out that, at least for Wily, the entry in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/erlang-solutions.list added by the erlang-solutions package is incorrect.

It reads: deb http://binaries.erlang-solutions.com/debian squeeze contrib, whereas the official instructions say you should have deb http://packages.erlang-solutions.com/ubuntu wily contrib.

As soon as I change that, the problem was solved.

TLDR;

  • Uninstall the erlang-solutions package
  • Add the repo manually in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/erlang-solutions.list:
deb http://packages.erlang-solutions.com/ubuntu wily contrib
  • Install packages