Distributed Version Control for ports(7) ( was: Re: autoconf update )

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

Konstantin Tokarev <annulen at yandex.ru> wrote:

> Why not Git?

One issue with either Git or Mercurial is that they are GPL.
AFAIK FreeBSD prefers to avoid GPL in the base or in critical
widely-used infrastructure if a viable non-GPL alternative
exists.  Granted SVN, currently used to manage src, is GPL;
but its critical use is only on the project's own servers
whereas the use being proposed for Git or Mercurial would
involve their being used in a distributed manner (that being
the whole point).

A second issue with Mercurial is that it is written in Python,
which seems to have adopted -- granted to a lesser extent --
the unfortunate Perl tendency for newer versions to be less
than completely compatible with earlier versions.  It would
seem problematic if the Python version used by Mercurial were
to be superseeded by an incompatible version, requiring the
entire distributed user base to migrate.