I know many people involved with software development have at least heard of distributed revision control (DRC), but there are still many that have not. In this series of articles I attempt to summarize the differences between distributed revision control and traditional centralized revision control while comparing different distributed revision control systems; namely the open source applications Mercurial, Git, Bazaar, and darcs.
Alright, alright, CALM DOWN. I apologize if your favorite application is not on the list, but I am going for quality over quantity, and these are the four systems I have used extensively. There are many others as well. Subversion and Perforce will be the centralized revision control systems that I use for reference.
For a more in-depth description of distributed revision control in general, check out this introduction, or this talk by Linus Torvalds (Warning: His views are very one-sided, so do not take it personally if he bashes your favorite revision control system).
Stay tuned for the first review: Mercurial.
