Mercurial in pure Java
Andrew Lentvorski
bsder at allcaps.org
Fri Oct 2 09:04:32 UTC 2009
Matt Mackall wrote:
> You can also expect that I for one would rather unfriendly towards a
> non-copyleft implementation of Mercurial.
>
And, to be honest, this is really more key than anything else, no?
Can a non-copyleft Mercurial be built legally? Almost certainly.
However, you'd better know how to jump through some major legal hoops to
prove this as you're going to make more than a few people quite angry.
At that point, why bother? You're implementation will always be treated
like a second-class pariah and users won't want to use it anyway.
Your best bet is probably a plugin into a Mercurial running in Jython.
This avoids requiring users to do a separate binary install of Python
onto their system.
While I find git and mercurial roughly equivalent, I have a slight
preference for mercurial over git because git was a second-class citizen
on Windows for a long time. If, however, my development were primarily
on Eclipse and I had issues getting mercurial installed everywhere I
needed but could get git because its a part of Eclipse, I would switch.
<shrug>
The license is what the license is. Live with it or vote with your feet.
The developers get the first word, but the users *always* get the last word.
-a
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