Offline source control

Question

I'm about to start a project where programmers will be contributing from their homes (much like stackoverflow was built)

I want to use some centralized source control, but I don't want it to require the programmers to be online, and the server may come offline from time to time (as at first it'll probably be my desktop machine)

I think I remember Jeff talking about this in some podcast, but I don't remember which one.

Is there a source control tool that works perhaps asynchronically by e-mail? Programmers could connect to download the latest version, and the checkin process would be sending files to an email account for example

Does such a thing exist?

EDIT: Sorry, I forgot to say that I'll be working with .NET (Visual Studio 2008)

It'd be great if it could be integrated into this environment... does GIT (suggested below) support that?

Answer 1

git is basically built with this scenario as one of the major requirements.

Others support it as well, they usually go under the name of "distributed version control system".

Answer 2

You're looking for a Distributed Revision Control, system such as Git, Bazaar, or Mercurial.

I personally like Bazaar because it has good windows support.

I think Mercurial may be the best choice in your case, as it seems to have a Visual studio plugin. It does have a web interface and ssh support, which are probably better options than email, but there is also an extension that allows patches via email.