Bazaar is a distributed versioning system.
Homepage: http://bazaar-vcs.org/
Tutorial: Bazaar in five minutes, Bazaar User Guide
bzr init bzr add file1 file2 fileN bzr commit -m "Initial import"
bzr init-repo bzr init trunk bzr init branches bzr init tags
bzr branch bzr://path/to/repo
This copies the branch to your local directory. The two repos are still independent.
bzr bind bzr://path/to/repo
Connects to that repository so commits are always made on both repos unless the –local parameter is given. Local commits can be merged later by bzr update followed by bzr commit. unbind removes the connection with the parent repo.
To import a Subversion dump, use svn2bzr.py (or at LaunchPad). You will mostly just convert the dumpfile to a big bzr-repo:
svn2bzr.py svn.dump bzr/
You can then push the repo to the central repo by issuing
bzr push bzr/ bzr://path/to/central/repo