RFC: Alternative for exemaker

[Mads Kiilerich]

Adrian Buehlmann wrote, On 06/22/2012 11:55 PM:
> The only drawback I see is that a hg.exe that was built in this way
> would link against a fixed major version of Python, like for example
> python27.
>
> But I don't think that's much of a hindrance.

Agreed. It is no different from Mercurial's binary extensions.

> For example, if I'd
> provide a hackable zip for download, which contains Python, then I know
> anway what major python version it contains. The download would be named
> like hackable-hg-python-27.zip or something like that.

Perhaps, but as long as the zip contains compatible hg.exe, python and 
Mercurial modules then there is no reason to highlight the python version.

> Of course the license for that hg.exe mini-project would be the same as
> for mercurial, as it links with mercurial (exemaker might have a bit of
> a problem here, if we start expanding it mercurial-specifics).

I haven't seen anything so far that makes the wrapper a derivative of 
Mercurial, so you could also choose a more permissive but GPL compatible 
license that would make it more usable in Python upstream and in other 
projects.

AFAICS it doesn't even have to be GPL compatible. The wrapper will just 
be a custom Python interpreter that can execute GPL hg.py and let hg.py 
load and link with the GPL Mercurial python code and DLLs. That is not 
substantially different from running Mercurial on a proprietary OS or in 
another (proprietary) VM. The wrapper will only have to be GPL 
compatible if it starts interacting directly with the running Mercurial 
process.

But GPL is fine.

/Mads