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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