GNU arch
 |
|
| Original author(s) | Thomas Lord |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Andy Tai |
| Last release |
1.3.5 / July 20, 2006
|
| Development status | Security fixes only |
| Operating system | GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OS X |
| Type | Revision control |
| License | GPL |
| Website | www |
GNU arch software is a distributed revision control system that is part of the GNU Project and licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is used to keep track of the changes made to a source tree and to help programmers combine and otherwise manipulate changes made by multiple people or at different times.
As of 2009, GNU arch's official status is deprecation, and only security fixes are applied.Bazaar (or 'bzr') has since also been made an official GNU project and can thus be considered the replacement for GNU arch. It is not a fork of Arch.
Being a distributed, decentralized versioning system, each revision stored using arch is uniquely globally identifiable; such identifier can be used in a distributed setting to easily merge or "cherry-pick" changes from completely disparate sources.
Being decentralized means that there is no need for a central server for which developers have to be authorized in order to contribute. As with other systems, a full read-only copy of a project is made accessible in an "official" repository via HTTP, , or ; but then, contributors are encouraged to make modifications and publish them in a public archive (repository) of their own, so that the head developer may manually merge changesets into the official repository.
To simulate the behavior of centralized revision control systems, the head developer could allow shell access (SSH) or write access (FTP, SFTP, WebDAV) to a server, allowing authorized users to commit to a central server. More often, GNU arch-managed projects have a lead benevolent dictator that merges changes from contributors.
GNU arch has several other features:
The original author and maintainer of GNU arch was Thomas Lord who started the project in 2001. The command used to manipulate GNU arch repositories is tla, an initialism for Tom Lord's Arch. Lord started GNU arch as a collection of shell scripts to provide an alternative to CVS. In 2003, arch became part of the GNU project.
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