I had to recently decide on a version control system to use. I couldn’t find a quick summary of the popular ones out there and what they’re good for. So after doing some research, here’s my take:
CVS. Oldest version control system that’s still remains popular. Now in maintenance mode only.
Subversion. The “new” CVS. Very popular so there’s lots of utilities built for it.
darcs. One of the newer “distributed” version control systems. Easy to use. Doesn’t seem to scale well for large projects though.
Mercurial. Another distributed version control system. Works well in Windows and *nix. Used by big projects such as Mozilla Firefox and the OpenJDK.
Git. Another distributed version control system. Lightning fast. Unix-like power (but also not as easy to use as others). Not so good Windows support. Used by the Linux Kernel project.
Conclusion? Use Git if your development is on Linux only. Mercurial otherwise. If you want something that just works and guarantees coverage of your behind in case things go wrong, go with the most popular system, Subversion.
I went with Mercurial.