future of HgKit

[Mike Meyer]

On Sat, 3 Oct 2009 20:55:38 +0200
Marcus Dubois <animatify at gmail.com> wrote:

> >
> > Mercurial is my favorite DVCS. Unfortunately I fail with each and every
> > step I do to improve Mercurial-Java integration.
> >
> 
> I have been following the discussions about "porting" Mercurial to Java and
> all
> the talk about different licenses. I must admit that I'm still confused,
> what
> are the status about a "port" or rewrite?

You know, I have no idea. From my background, when you talk about
"porting" code, you're talking about modifying it run on a platform it
hasn't previously run on. For example, the unix code base was ported
from 16 to 32 bit platforms a couple of decades ago, then back to 16
bit platforms to run on micros, and more recently to 64 bit platforms.
The standard saying was "There is no such thing as portable code;
there's only ported code."

With that definition, it doesn't make sense to talk about "porting" a
program to another language - you're not making the existing code run
somewhere else, you're creating new code that has the same behavior as
the old code. You could port mercurial to Jython (or IronPython, or
another Python implementation), but not to Java. I haven't been able
to find another definition of "port" that applies in this context, so
I've had to guess what the author meant from the context.