After my adventures with subversion (svn), I was a little nervous, especially when I saw that Arch also uses the neon library. But for the most part, the Arch build was short and sweet. Arch has a very different model from CVS or svn. In Arch they use branches for everything, and make it easy to merge branches together. That seems kind of interesting. Even more interesting is that there really isn't any notion of a centralized server. Everyone can have their own repository and people decide whether or not they view another repository as a main line of development or not. Depending on the scenario, this seems like it would allow a very flexible way to organize groups of developers. So for now I'm going to try this, along with an Arch to CVS tool.

I've just started out with this, so I'll report more as I go along, but for those of you interested in trying this at home: The Arch Wiki tells you how to get Arch and build it. This IRC transcript gives a quick tutorial on Arch. I also grabbed some tools off of the Arch wiki: cscvs, an Arch to CVS tool, tla-tools, which has a bunch of extra tools (and is cranky about building on OS X without GNU sed -- cranky as in hangs), tla.el, which provides simple Arch support in Emacs, and zsh-completion for tla, since there are lots of new commands to learn.