[TxMt] which version control system to take?

[Andy Armstrong]

On 29 Feb 2008, at 17:07, Thomas Aylott - subtleGradient wrote:
> Although I've been trying to move to Mercurial or Git for quite a  
> while, I would most highly recommend Subversion for what you have in  
> mind.

[snip]

I'd second all that. For most writing projects Subversion should be  
ideal. It only gets tricky if you want to do a load of branching and  
merging - and even then it's fairly straightforward if you follow the  
rules.

A caveat: most version control systems, Subversion included, are best  
at merging changes from multiple sources if those changes are confined  
to discreet lines. For code that's usually not a problem but with text  
someone might be tempted to reformat text to, e.g. pull a paragraph  
back into shape after edits. Because words are reflowed across  
multiple lines that makes the effective extent of the change much  
greater - and can result in commit conflicts which have to be resolved  
manually.

That's less of a problem if different committers are working on  
different parts of the document and also if everyone commits pretty  
regularly rather than attempting to commit large sets of edits at once.

-- 
Andy Armstrong, Hexten