On Sun, 26 Oct 2014, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
But a very important point in tooling was, that the utility to checkout is distributed with the base system. Neither hg nor git can satisfy here.
Could you explain what you mean by "checkout" here?
He means that, after one installs NetBSD from distribution media, the resulting system should include the tools needed to check out a copy of the NetBSD source code from the central repository (or from a local or public mirror or fork). I'd add that merely checking out is not enough; we'd probably want to be able to perform all the other common actions too (log, diff, branch, merge, commit, etc.).
This has implications for the licence, size, and dependencies, of the version control system. git depends on perl, and hg depends on python, but neither perl nor python are part of the NetBSD base system. Perhaps there is a useful subset of git that does not depend on perl, but it seems unlikely that there would be a useful subset of hg that does not depend on python.