Towards a new standard for allowing concurrency and ensuring consistency in revision control systems

Version control systems play a very important role in maintaining the revision history of software and facilitating software evolution. As the software development process is gradually taking the form of a collaborative effort among several teams hosted over widely dispersed sites, centralized version control systems are gradually giving way to multi-sited version control systems. Ensuring the integrity and consistency of versioned objects in a environment that supports concurrent access, is a difficult problem. The paradigm of transactions has been successfully used in database systems to ensure integrity of objects. In this paper, we look into the transaction management requirements of version control systems and propose a new transaction model of revision control.