There are several papers and other publications about Vesta 2:
Allan Heydon, Roy Levin, Timothy Mann, Yuan Yu.
The Vesta Approach to Software Configuration Management (abstract) (pdf) (pdf, alternate host) (postscript)
Compaq Systems Research Center Research Report 168, March 9, 2001
- An introduction to the main concepts used in Vesta. It describes Vesta's advantages over traditional software configuration management tools, how those benefits are achieved, and the system's overall performance.
Allan Heydon, Roy Levin, Timothy Mann, Yuan Yu.
The Vesta Software Configuration Management System (abstract) (pdf) (pdf, alternate host) (postscript)
Compaq Systems Research Center Research Report 177, January 22, 2002, 231 pp.
- A book-length research report describing the entire system in detail. This is the most complete reference for the system. (Note that this is a research report, not a user's manual.)
Allan Heydon, Jim Horning, Roy Levin, Timothy Mann, Yuan Yu.
The Vesta-2 Software Description Language (html) (abstract)
Compaq Systems Research Center Technical Note 1997-005c, Revised June 2, 1998.
A technical note defining the Vesta software description language. Slightly outdated. Refer to the language specification instead.
Timothy Mann.
Partial Replication in the Vesta Software Repository (abstract) (pdf) (pdf, alternate host) (postscript)
Compaq Systems Research Center Research Report 172, August 17, 2001.
- This report explains the concepts behind Vesta's replication capabilities, which are central to distributed development using Vesta.
Allan Heydon, Roy Levin, Yuan Yu.
Caching Function Calls Using Precise Dependencies (pdf) (postscript)
Appeared in Programming Language Design and Implementation 2000.
- A technical paper on fine-grained dependency analysis and caching. These techniques are the basis for Vesta's incremental build support.
Kenneth Schalk
Presentation from CodeCon 2004 (html)
Slides describing Vesta presented at CodeCon 2004.