New approaches to software source management have led to an explosion of version control systems being written. Often the appearance is that the difference between them is merely cosmetic, and that picking any one will do.

However, there are some important differences between them: distributed vs centralized, content hashing vs UUID generating, patch based vs snapshot based, etc. It helps when assessing which version control system to use for a project to know what the design choices they have made to the development styles that work well with them.

This talk will focus on git and bazaar-NG (bzr) as leading examples of next generation distributed version control systems, with the differences between them and current generation systems neutrally presented.