ideas from the Git revision control system. It was announced in June 2005, the first pre-release was in July and the last in August, just prior to Lord's resignation as maintainer. revc only had 10 core commands and Lord intended to eliminate restrictive namespaces, complicated file naming conventions and increase the speed. As of 2008 the last pre-release, 0.0x2, of revc is still available and Lord is still interested in some of the ideas in GNU arch but does not have the resources to resume development of revc. Criticism Perhaps the most common criticism of GNU arch is that it is difficult to learn, even for users who have experience with other SCM systems. In particular, GNU arch has a large number of commands, which can be intimidating for new users and some design elements arguably too strongly enforce Lord's taste in version control practices. Some also criticize GNU arch for using very unusual file naming conventions (), which can create difficulties for using it in scripts, some shells, and in porting it to non-Unix operating systems. GNU arch has been criticised for having a slow running time as part of a design decision to lessen internal code complexity. See also Revision control List of revision control software Comparison of revision control software References External links LWN.net article on arch Free version control software Free software programmed in C GNU Project software Distributed version control systems Discontinued version control systems 2001 software