Promoting the use of Mercurial; was: Re: gnome dvcs survey results

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy at imag.fr> wrote:
> "Gabor Grothendieck" <ggrothendieck at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 1:33 PM, Theodore Tso <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
>>> (already done in git 1.6), and there are developers that are working
>>> quite steadily on the Windows ports.
>>
>> How will this work?  You can't have a true Windows system if its
>> written in shell scripts so those would all have to be rewritten.
>
> Err, windows is about the operating system. Shell-script is about the
> language. You could say also that since hg is written in python, it
> can't run on windows because it needs a python runtime.

Its more than just the language but its how everything works. One
wants to key into Microsoft technologies including Explorer (which
TortoiseHg does nicely), COM, dotNet, the Windows registry, Microsoft
user interface standards, etc.  It might be possible to put enough of
a layer over it to hide its UNIX heritage but if its written in bash/csh
or similar I suspect its not likely.  If you've used Windows for a while
and then you get a program that was just ported over from UNIX without
really converting it to Windows style its obvious and not very inviting.