What version-control system is most trivial to set up and use for toy projects?

Question

I teach the third required intro course in a CS department. One of my homework assignments asks students to speed up code they have written for a previous assignment. Fact

Answer 1

Second the choice of Mercurial

Advantages

• Excellent documentation.
• Graphical view command to show branching.
• Cross-platform.
• Comes with a GUI for all platforms (TortoiseHG, or thg).
• Built-in web server for viewing the project.
• Can keep your project on your thumbdrive.
  • Work can be saved even if only one member of the pair remembered their laptop. Not that that would ever happen.

Disadvantages

• Must install Python if not already present.
  • Easy to do, but it is another step.
• Understanding the distinction between push/pull vs update/commit.
  • (This is common to all distributed VCS).
• The distinction between heads and tips.
• Some commands aren't immediately available; they must be explicitly enabled.
  • (This is generally consider advantageous by the community as it keeps things simple; some others disagree though).