Versioning System Shootout

Bram Cohen invented BitTorrent, a software application so reliable that people sometimes think it's broken because it's operating too smoothly than they expect it should.

So when Bram mulls over the recent inception of git and compares its guts to some other versioning control systems, I pay attention.

He mentions that he's working on a competing software package called Codeville, and this immediately grabs my attention. A very cursory inspection reveals that Codeville is very "Bramy", by which I mean it:

1. relies on Python
2. runs on multiple platforms
3. has incredibly complicated internal mechanisms designed to overcome non-obvious real-life problems that would arise otherwise
4. is smart about who it trusts data from and how it knows that data remains unaltered by other parties
5. "just works"
6. is going to make some people very happy, and some people very angry