If you are interested in VCS, check the “Better SCM initiative” website.

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. CVS is the most commonly used revision control system in the Open-Source world as of this writing. It works well and is relatively reliable but has many limitations. It does not do file renames or copies, send the files to the server, no atomicity of operations, and no good handling of binary files. Clearly it is showing its age.

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

They provide useful information about available CVS alternatives and a comparision between various VCS, on an item-by-item basis.