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.