ArX is a distributed

Distributed computing

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...

 revision control

Revision control

Revision control, also known as version control and source control , is the management of changes to documents, programs, and other information stored as computer files. It is most commonly used in software development, where a team of people may change the same files...

 system. ArX began as a fork of GNU arch

GNU arch

In computing, GNU arch is a distributed revision control system that is part of the GNU Project and licensed under the GNU General Public License...

, and is licensed under the GPL

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

. Since the fork, ArX has been extensively rewritten in C++, with many new features. The project maintainer is Walter Landry.

History

Landry was for a short time the maintainer of Arch, and forked ArX when Tom Lord resumed maintainership of Arch and did not accept some of Landry's development directions. The fork was announced in January 2003 and the first code was released in February. For a time ArX shared a mailing list and community with Arch, but Landry founded a new mailing list in August 2003 and the pre-release series became the 1.0 release series in December. The 2.0 series, which was incompatible with Arch, became public in October 2004.