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

I have had some very good experience with Bazaar. Like Git/Mercurial it is distributed. It is serverless - you do not need a daemon installed on the server hosting the repository, even if you are accessing it remotely (ie, it can work just as an FTP/SFTP share).

A distributed VCS is most flexible. You can check out a branch from a more traditional 'central' repository and gain all the benefit of being able to fork off your own little development separate to the central server, etc and then, perhaps, push your changes back up.

There are import tools for other VCSs such as Subversion though I haven't tried them.