It seems as though Linus (he wrote git right?) has successfully performed his coup of the version control systems. Ok, not really, but its surprising that he could change what was thought to be an essentially solved problem with cvs and then svn. I would have never thought that someone could come up with a better CVS, but then SVN came out. Then came Git, and then this. Just goes to show that even problems that seem "solved" might have better solutions given a different set of situations.
Ahh... I knew Git was basically started with that Bitkeeper war, but since I don't really follow linux politics much as I don't use it all that often, I didn't realize that hg was started then as well. They seem very similar in their paradigm shift away from the central repository style of CVS and SVN. Is that a coincidence or was Bitkeeper also in this everything is a branch method?
I think it was Bitkeeper's solid decentralized workflow that convinced Linus that VC would even be feasible for kernel development; hg and git were written after people realized that they could no longer do without the features that Bitkeeper had.
Never would have thought that someone could come up with a better cvs? Really? I bumped into cvs' limitations the first time I committed a badly named file.
Also, making it out like the history of open source version control tools goes cvs -> svn -> git -> hg is missing a lot of history. (Get it?)
There are some others, too, like darcs, arch, bzr, and probably others.
I'm super conservative about version control. I'll wait until there's one clear winner, the bugs have been ironed out, lots of tools have been written for it, sourceforge/google code/etc... support it, and so on. I'll save my exploration time for other things.
