As the result of some experiments with Mercurial, which is one representative of the upcoming generation of "distributed" version control systems, the Isabelle history is now available online:
http://isabelle.in.tum.de/isabelle-bin/mercurial.cgi The web interface allows to browse conveniently through 15 years of recorded history: the CVS era starts at Thu Sep 16 12:20:38 1993, see the large (!) changeset 0 (hash key a5a9c433f639). Some pre-historical records of Isabelle development are also available: http://isabelle.in.tum.de/isabelle-bin/mercurial.cgi/file/a5a9c433f639/edits.txt Right now the underlying data is retrieved from the official CVS repository every other hour. This means the website can be already be used seriously, to query the history, or subscribe to changes via the rss/atom feed, or just learn how to use Mercurial. Over time we will see if it is feasible to convert the actual repository at some point. See http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/ for more information on the "hg" client of Mercurial. The quick start is as follows: hg clone http://isabelle.in.tum.de/isabelle-bin/mercurial.cgi isabelle-hg This will produce a self-contained clone of the online repository (150MB of disk space). An adhoc web service can then be spawned like this: cd isabelle-hg; hg serve -v Now you can browse through this locally, using Firefox etc. Updates from the original version can be "pulled" later, see the fine Mercurial manuals. A general introduction to distributed version control is given here: http://betterexplained.com/articles/intro-to-distributed-version-control-illustrated/ The nice thing is that well-engineered systems like Mercurial and Bazaar are actually easier to use than CVS or SVN, which have accumulated a lot of legacy features over time. Only the better-known git by Torvalds is a bit more cryptic, being targeted at kernel hackers, but his Google talk is quite interesting nonetheless. Makarius
