[ANN] MacHg 0.9.0 : OSX gui client for Mercurial

[Augie Fackler]

On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 7:24 PM, Benoit Boissinot <bboissin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 02:09:07AM +0200, Jason Harris wrote:
>>
>> On May 3, 2010, at 1:57 AM, Benoit Boissinot wrote:
>>
>> > On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 1:20 AM, Jason Harris <jason at jasonfharris.com> wrote:
>> >> Hi All,
>> >> I am pleased to announce the initial public release of MacHg.
>> >> MacHg is a gui client for Mercurial. It runs under OSX 10.6 (Snow leopard).
>> >
>> > I guess this is the first native client for OSX?
>>
>> There is Murky as well by Jens Alfke. MacHg is a bit bigger in scope.
>> MacHg does things in a threaded way and has nice annimations and
>> guiness throughout... Also I will let the dust settle on everything
>> before I compare MacHg to murky. (I am the author of MacHg so
>> obviously I am a bit biased! :) )
>
> Yeah, and I discovered http://jwwalker.com/pages/macmerc.html in
> OtherTools, but there are no screenshots so I don't have any idea how it
> compares (and the changelog isn't dated, so I don't know if it's still
> maintained).
>> >
>> > Users usually like screenshots too :)
>>
>> Ahh yes the sreenshots are here...
>>
>> http://jasonfharris.com/machg/sceenshots/sceenshots.html
>
> Nice, I like the "What will happen" (does TortoiseHg do that too?)
>> >
>> > It's not obvious under which licence your software is. In the repo,
>> > you included mercurial (GPLv2+) and some BSD libraries. If you
>> > distribute your software with mercurial, that probably makes the
>> > resulting binaries GPL.
>> > But technically it seems you only call hg from the command line, so as
>> > long as you don't include Hg in your repo you could use another
>> > license (e.g. BSD or Apache).
>>
>> That was my understanding of it as well. Basically since I only call
>> the command line mercurial and do all of the interfacing through its
>> public interface then its not a derived work... and so it can be
>> licensed under BSD or GPL, or whatever. I actually spent some time
>> looking around trying to figure out what the best license was and in
>> the end it wasn't so clear.
>> I am basically open to suggestions and if the Mercurial team thinks I
>> should go with GPLv2, or GPLv2+, or GPL3, or GPLv3+, or BSD, or
>> apache, or something else this will obviously carry a lot of weight
>> with me.
>
> Personnally I'm fine if you go with Apache or BSD (as long as it's free
> and open source), and since you only use the command line, it's fair for
> you to use a more liberal license.
>
> I'll let other comment about the fact you embedded mercurial's source in
> the repo and in your binary distribution. I guess that makes the
> distributed package GPL but your code can still be under the BSD
> license.

IANAL, etc. That said, it's common to include GPL binaries and shell
out to them and not cause license pollution, especially in OS X
binaries where the "binary" is really a directory full of files. You
should be fine with BSD (although it's worth noting that Apache 2
provides some extra nice features above the traditional BSD license.)

>
>> The upshot is I am trying to release it for free use by anyone, and
>> its donation ware. I was humbly asking that it would be nice if
>> commercial organizations donated something like US$20 per seat, but
>> this is *not* compulsory at all. If they don't think its worth that
>> they can go on using it scott free...
>
> It seems reasonable to me (and I from what I can see, it's quite common
> on the OSX world).
>
> Cheers,
>
> Benoit
>
> --
> :wq
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