Better SCM Initiative

Introduction

Version control systems (or Source Configuration Management systems) allow developers or authors to keep track of the history of their projects’ source code - to checkout older versions, maintain several branches, and merge results. The Better SCM Site is a site for comparison and advocacy of version control systems (VCSes).

When Better-SCM started, CVS was the most commonly used version control system in the open source world. It worked well and was relatively reliable, but it had many limitations. It did not perform file renames or copies, did not send the files to the server, had no atomicity of operations, and it did not have good handling of binary files.

To address this problem several alternatives emerged, some of which were either open-source or available to the community of open-source developers. The Better SCM project aimed to empower them, to compare them, and criticize them, hopefully leading to each being a more complete and accessible replacement.

Nowadays most open-source projects are no longer using CVS, and its numerous alternatives have matured. So Better SCM continues with its mission to improve the current state of the art of version control systems.

Available CVS Alternatives

General Documents

General Links

• Rick Moen's List of Version-Control and SCMs for Linux - an overview listing the available alternatives with brief descriptions.
• The New Breed of Version Control Systems - a copy of an old article, originally published on ONLamp.com with an overview of several version control systems, which were prominent at the time.
• Wikipedia Entry about "Version Control" - see the navigation box at the bottom with the list of implementations.