Hi there, while you may get a great response from someone here, you may also want to x-post this question to /r/AskSocialScience given the political science elements involved.

I can't speak for everyone, but while I may study these kinds of conflicts I rarely deal with the technicalities of defining each in political science terms.

I can say that from what I've read there seems to be a preference among some writers about these topics to refer to various kinds of "civil conflict" rather than "civil war" given the kinds of ambiguities you allude to, let alone the number of conflicts that might look more like ethnic cleansing or genocide rather than civil "war".

This depends on how strict your definitions are. At their most simple,

A civil war is a war in which two competing factions inside one nation take up arms against each other.

An independence war is a war in which part of a nation, or a vassal/protectorate/satellite of a nation, attempts to break off from the mother country.

A revolutionary war is one in which the objective is to overthrow the defending nation/faction's government.

The main issue with these definitions is that you insist to use the word 'war'. 'Conflict' would be a better term. The French Revolution, for example, is a fantastic example of a revolutionary conflict, but it never really broke out into what we would consider a war. Revolutionary wars in particular are a tricky topic to define because they tend to fall into one of the other two of these categories. For example, the definitive revolutionary war is the American Revolution, which was itself also a war of independence. On that note, the American Revolution might not even definitionally be a revolutionary war, as the British government was never functionally changed although they granted independence to the colonies.

I'll let someone more comfortable with theory expand on this, but I think I can provide some historical context.

A civil war is probably the broadest of these labels, as it includes any instance of the same political entity fighting each other. This will often happen in the context of revolutionary and independence wars. For example, the American Civil War was both a civil war and a war of independence. Julius Caesar's war with Pompey, on the other hand, was a more classic civil war, since Caesar's men were not intentionally fighting to remake Roman society.

A revolutionary War is an internal conflict where one side aims to overthrow the government (and/or social order) of a polity and replace it with something different. The French, Russian, and Cuban Revolutions are classical examples of this.

A war of independence is an attempt by a region or colony to break away from its current government. I would think that all wars of independence are also revolutionary wars. Considering that there are almost always significant numbers of people willing to fight to defend the old system, wars of independence and revolutions are also civil wars. The American War of Independence and the American Civil War are examples of all three types of war at once.