Before I start I just want to say thanks to all the people leaving comments. This post actually comes out of what Frabcus has left in the comments about distributed revision control.
I've been having a serious look into all the distributed revision control systems out there (well, the free ones at least) not only to understand the concepts of them but to see how easy they would be to use since they tend to lack the UI tools.
Interestingly Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu founder has been discussing distributed revision control on his blog. There are four posts here, here, here and here.
But now to the subject of this post, the Tortoises. First there was TortoiseCVS which interestingly was started by an ex-NC Graphics employee Francis Irving. Then there is obviously TortoiseSVN.
So for these new distributed systems it looks like they are racing for Tortoise type implementations of user interfaces on Windows which would help to attract Windows developers.
There is TortoiseDarcs for Darcs. This is the most complete implementation for the distributed systems so far. There are some good screenshots on the TortoiseDarcs website.
For Bazaar (run by Canonical of Ubuntu fame and what Mark Shuttleworth was talking about on his blog) there is TortoiseBzr. It is using TortoiseCVS as a base to expand from. There is also a placeholder on the wiki for Visual Studio integration.
For Mercurial there was an announcement on their mailing list that someone has started on Tortoise-hg and they ave a small set of functionality. It hasn't been publicly released yet, but hopefully soon.
There is no TortoiseGit being looked at, but I think the Windows support requires work before that step is taken I suppose.
