RFC: Alternative for exemaker

[Adrian Buehlmann]

On 2012-06-23 14:23, Mads Kiilerich wrote:
> 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.

You've just convinced me that jumping to GPL2+ was perhaps a bit
premature. At the moment, there is probably indeed nothing that forces
me to use the GPL regarding interacting with Mercurial.

So I've switched the license and took the same as hglib:
https://bitbucket.org/abuehl/hgexe/raw/279fef56d63e/hg.c

If we start to move things from Mercurial into hgexe - however small
they may be - I'll narrow it to GPL2+ again without further ado.