RCS, CVS and SVN are in a real sense the same thing. You can view CVS as fixing a bug in RCS (it doesn't have concurrency), and SVN as fixing bugs in CVS (it do

RCS, CVS and SVN are in a real sense the same thing. You can view CVS as fixing a bug in RCS (it doesn't have concurrency), and SVN as fixing bugs in CVS (it doesn't have atomic commits). That is even how the SVN developers themselves marketed it. Hg and git are different. It's not like SVN has a bug "it isn't distributed". It is fundamentally not distributed. So the progression is: 1. Stop manually backing up versions, it sucks. Use RCS/CVS/SVN. 2. Stop using RCS/CVS/SVN, they suck. Use git/Hg. I can easily imagine a new DVCS system that would fix bugs in git or Hg. The git UI sucks for example. But I can't easily imagine a fundamentally different successor to DVCS. (Not that such a successor won't happen - of course it will. I just can't imagine what it will look like).