Better SCM Initiative : Arch
Note about Relevance
As of 2018, this site has become mostly irrelevant.
Note about Arch
GNU Arch has been deprecated, and is no longer widely used. Most of the former GNU Arch users have migrated to Bazaar and other version control systems. As a result, the information on this page is no longer very relevant.
Homepage
Implementations
- tla - the most common Arch implementation. Written in C, and maintained by Tom Lord, the originator of Arch.
- ArX - a version of Arch that is incompatible with tla, and has some advantages.
- baz - a fork of tla, which aims to provide better Subversion compatibility, and other nice features.
Note: related to baz is the project Bazaar. Its new program, bzr, is written from scratch. It aims to offer some advantages over baz, but is not an Arch implementation, nor is it compatible with baz. A tool is available to convert baz repositories into bzr, but not the other way around.
Summary
Arch was created by Tom Lord to satisfy his and others revision control needs. It handles file renames, branching, changesets and other things that CVS lacks.
In a message to the Subversion Development Team Tom Lord noted that it is worthwhile to unify Arch' approach to distribution and Subversion's approach to storage management. When the following will take course has yet to be seen.
Arch has the advantage that its service is nothing more than a dumb remote file-transfer protocol (FTP, SFTP and WebDAV over HTTP or HTTPS are supported). This makes it very easy to set up a service of it.
Links
- Dmoz.org Category of Arch Resource - contains other links.