Version Control Systems - GNU Emacs Manual

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32.1.1.2 Supported Version Control Systems

VC currently works with many different version control systems, which it refers to as back ends:

SCCS was the first version control system ever built, and was long ago superseded by more advanced ones. VC compensates for certain features missing in SCCS (e.g., tag names for releases) by implementing them itself. Other VC features, such as multiple branches, are simply unavailable. Since SCCS is non-free, we recommend avoiding it.
CSSC is a free replacement for SCCS. You should use CSSC only if, for some reason, you cannot use a more recent and better-designed version control system.
RCS is the free version control system around which VC was initially built. It is relatively primitive: it cannot be used over the network, and works at the level of individual files. Almost everything you can do with RCS can be done through VC.
CVS is the free version control system that was, until recently (circa 2008), used by the majority of free software projects. Nowadays, it is slowly being superseded by newer systems. CVS allows concurrent multi-user development either locally or over the network. Unlike newer systems, it lacks support for atomic commits and file moving/renaming. VC supports all basic editing operations under CVS.
Subversion (SVN) is a free version control system designed to be similar to CVS but without its problems (e.g., it supports atomic commits of filesets, and versioning of directories, symbolic links, meta-data, renames, copies, and deletes).
GNU Arch is one of the earliest distributed version control systems (the other being Monotone). See VCS Concepts, for a description of distributed version control systems. It is no longer under active development, and has been deprecated in favor of Bazaar.
Git is a distributed version control system originally invented by Linus Torvalds to support development of Linux (his kernel). VC supports many common git operations, but others, such as repository syncing, must be done from the command line.
Mercurial (hg) is a distributed version control system broadly resembling git. VC supports most Mercurial commands, with the exception of repository sync operations.
Bazaar (bzr) is a distributed version control system that supports both repository-based and distributed versioning. VC supports most basic editing operations under Bazaar.

Previous versions of VC supported a version control system known as Meta-CVS. This support was dropped due to limited interest from users and developers.