On Feb 29, 2008, at 5:37 PM, Christoph Held wrote:
[...]
I will advertise Subversion a bit more.
So: if the requirements were:
- up-to-date versioning
SVN is up to date.
- easy install
There is a great book called Version Control with Subversion available [1] that covers most of the steps (which are not many). Download it, print it, read it. It does only cover the command-line client but everything translates nice to every GUI-client.
One drawback of SVN is that it requires a smart server - so you need someone that knows at least a bit about setting up a server.
- idiot friendly
Well, its quite hard to really shoot yourself in the foot with subversion. There is a very friendly and active mailing list (subversion-user) that should solve all remaining problems.
- collaboration friendly (merging of textfiles having been altered
by several authors independently should be doable; see point 3 above)
Merging is possible. Be aware though that merging works best with code files (their structure is much easier to make sense of), but this is a problem of every versioning system. It will cry on conflict though and mark the conflicts.
- offline work happens (branching and merging)
You can branch offline (though discouraged for some reasons of history tracking), but you will not be able to commit any changes without a server. If this is a huge point for you, consider something different. (perhaps SVK, which is build on SVN ;) )
- perhaps OS-independent (in case I can convince those other co-
authors)
Sure. There are nice GUI-Clients for SVN on every platform an the server does run many. In my opinion, TortoiseSVN for Windows is by far the best of them, the only reason why i miss win ;). Textmates SVN- Bundle is really nice, too.
- existence of a bundle providing integration into Textmate would
be a huge plus (but consider that I may be satisfied with a very limited subset of what every versioning system offers already)
As above.
- not sure if applicable: if a visualization tool such as
Changes.app for diffing said textfiles be callable to compare versions that would be great, too. My experience with Filemerge et al, is limited because it does not seem to like UTF-8 very much (which I require).
Subversion can use several diff-tools (2-way and 3-way).[2]
Thanks Christoph
[1] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ [2] http://www.brunningonline.net/simon/blog/archives/002033.html