I wanted a system which was like CVS but was peer to peer. Backup goes someway to solving this problem. Backup's stratergy is as follows:

• Make contact with as many other machines working on this project as you can
• Request status on all the files in this project
• update to and from all the machines we are talking to

backup is smart enough to resolve conflicts between RCS files, if it detects conflicts in other files it emails the responsible people with a diff of the conflict and asks them to fix it.

I use backup to keep all my software on all my computers up-to-date, it works well - I can grab my laptop and it will have current versions of all the code I'm currently working on. When I get home it will update the copies on my other machines.

Backup has some serious deficiencies - it doesn't scale at all well - and I've not tried it in a multi user situation - i suspect it would fail badly - it doesn't have nearly enough file locks.

anyway you can have a look at the code