Set of requirements compiled during a version control system (VCS) meeting in March 2006. Some of these requirements explicitly conflict; it's not expected that a single solution will fulfill all of these. These are also not prioritized in any way; that's still an outstanding task.
* changesets
* move/rename files/directories with full history and appropriate behaviour with old branches/pull by date
* atomic operations
** every operation versioned: tagging, branching, etc. are part of history (or at least logged)
* private/local branching
** sane merging
*** history-sensitive merging
* topic branches
** with control over when you pull in outside changes into your branch
* ability to tag/branch bugzilla/js/etc. subcomponents of a tree without tagging entire tree
* tools integration
** blame (like current bonsai)
** revision history
** source browsing
** source indexing
** tree closure/override
** reports/metrics
*** commits, committers, etc.
* access control
** restrict people to specific areas
** restrict areas/branches to specific people
** group membership
** being able to query where people have access
** audited ACL changes
** versioned ACLs
* cross-platform (unix/mac/windows)
* open source
* file forking/diverging with history
* cherry-picking of changesets
* offline operation
** offline diff
** offline commit/merge/etc.
** partial history pull
*** including zero history
* tree information
** tree-wide diff
** selective diff
** known/unknown/missing files
* selective commit
* work with standard patches
* stable/reliable/maintained
* charset awareness
* line-ending conversion
* binary files (efficient)
* GUI tool for basic operations
* as easy or easier than CVS for checkout/commit/diff/update/merge (on trunk and on branches)
* partial tree pulls (localizers)
* import full mozilla CVS repository
** if we can't, why?
* fast working directory updates
** (checkout-by-date -> tip, branch -> branch, ...)
* pull historical version and check in changes to files in historical version
* integrity checking on repository
** checksums for error detection
* transit mechanisms
** ssh
** https
** anonymous read-only (http?)
* bootstrap local repo via blob pull
* signed commits/changesets
* hooks
** all repository operations
* bugzilla integration
** automatic notification to bugzilla of what was checked in (add attachment based on changeset)
** associate bugmail with committer
* keep committer ID separate from the actual person
* arbitrary versioned metadata on files/attributes
** permission bits
** key/value pairs