"The Vesta Approach to Software Configuration Management"
Allan Heydon, Roy Levin, Timothy Mann, Yuan Yu 
Note #1999-001. June 22, 1999.

Vesta is a system for software configuration management. It stores
collections of source files, keeps track of which versions of which
files go together, and automates the process of building a complete
software artifact from its component pieces. Vesta's novel approach
gives it three important properties not available in other systems.
First, every build is repeatable, because its component sources and
build tools are stored immutably and immortally, and its configuration
description completely describes what components and tools are used
and how they are put together. Second, every build is incremental,
because results of previous builds are cached and reused. Third, every
build is consistent, because all build dependencies are automatically
captured and recorded, so that a cached result from a previous build
is reused only when doing so is certain to be correct. In addition,
Vesta's flexible language for writing configuration descriptions makes
it easy to describe large software configurations in a modular fashion
and to create variant configurations by customizing build parameters.
This paper describes Vesta's advantages over traditional tools, how
those benefits are achieved, and the system's overall performance.