A fixes a bug. The bug fix should apply to everyone who derrived from the original tree. Anywhere it's sent, if it is further exported it can eventually reach everyone. The linked development trees form an ad-hoc network. The thing that DMS does that no other system does is allow changes to propgate at different speeds.
Bug fixes can fly across the network while enhancements crawl.
Status DMS is an unfunded project. Development is slow and DMS is not expected to be ready until sometime in '98. DMS is being written in perl5. Currently, a multi-user transaction database is being built because there do not appear to be any reliable, multiuser, free relational databases.