pure-python mercurial

[Brendan Cully]

On Thursday, 05 March 2009 at 16:56, Paul Moore wrote:
> 2009/3/5 TK Soh <teekaysoh at gmail.com>:
> > On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 1:06 AM, Weijun Wang <Weijun.Wang at sun.com> wrote:
> >>> Thanks for the tip, but looks like the --pure option is meant for this
> >>> too. I will give it a try.
> >>
> >> I find out that changing the "PURE=" at the top of Makefile to
> >> "PURE=--pure" also works.
> >
> > I just installed using --pure, and it seemed to work fine. I also
> > don't feel any significant slow down when using TortoiseHg on it
> > (running the regular 'day-to-day' functions) so far. Granted,
> > TortoiseHg is not a fastest kind of GUI itself ;-)
> >
> > It's going take more time to get the real feel on this, but I can live
> > with it so far.
> >
> > Thanks for a good work.
> 
> This may be a silly question, but what is the purpose of this? I
> assume there's no intention that the "official" builds of Mercurial
> and TortoiseHg are ever going to be built as --pure?

One thing it does is allow people to use hg in environments lacking a
compiler. I can tell you it would have made the old
mercurial-on-sourceforge setup much easier :)

I think it's pretty common for a hosting service to provide python but
not gcc.