py-mercurial

[Daniel Ericsson]

Hi,

I want to move mercurial to allow for installation with any version of Python, that's supported and the user have chosen as their selected version. The tickets for this have subsided as most people have settled down on Python 2.7 which now is what mercurial has as python.default_version. Binary archives also helps when people don't have to wait for a compile of version of python they aren't interested in.

But this should be fixed as people might move to Python3 and it's gonna be another cycle of mixed Python installations.

Mercurial is mostly just a python package, with all the help one gets from the python portgroup to add different subports for different versions my first thought is actually to deprecate mercurial and rename the port to py-mercurial. Is there any reason we should keep the old port around beyond a replaced_by keyword?

Some people have thought of variants for selecting which version to install, but having a mercurial port with +py*-variants to select which py-mercurial-subport gets installed as a dependency feels somewhat like a matryoshka doll to me. Is there a way to keep the mercurial port as a stub port and add another py-mercurial stub-port inside it, also a bit nested but will lessen impact on users and there is no need to deprecate the mercurial port outright.

As a final step I've been thinking of adding a hg_select port to switch which py*-mercurial installation /opt/local/bin/hg* is symlinked to but I'm not sure this is necessary - as long as people can execute hg they'll probably not be concerned about where the module lives and for which version of python it's installed.

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/27757 has some discussion of the issue.

thanks for any input,
-- Daniel