When I worked for a software company, we had version control setup (Subversion), which was a godsend. It was a little bit of a pain to get going, but once it worked it was great.

I would love to use some kind of version control now. Nothing fancy -- for example, I collaborate with a mathematician from Japan, and I would love version control with a good diffing feature. I'm thinking web interface, we can both upload versions of the file, run diffs, choose which changes to keep and which to discard. Ideally, this could all be done from a webpage.

I know enough programming to speculate that this should not be too terribly difficult (although of course I could be mistaken).

Such a solution does not seem to be out there. Just this morning, I tried Github. It makes me install git first, and when I install it I get the following error message:

dyld: unknown required load command 0x80000022 Trace/BPT trap

Upon Googling and fixing that:

error: Cannot access URL https://github.com/FrankThorne/Frank-Test-Repository.git/, return code 60

What the f* is that? I could google that too, but I don't know how long it will take before it eventually works. I suck at system administration (and have more pressing things to do than learn it), and I have often found that "trivial" tasks take me several hours.

Subversion, Bitbucket, even Dropbox (on Linux), same story.

Now, of course, suppose I do whatever is required to install this, which is probably easy but could turn out to be a headache. The real pain point is that I then have to persuade my colleagues to use it, and if installation causes them any difficulty, then I look like an ass.

Almost no research mathematicians use version control. We all should be. The way to make this painless (as far as I can tell) is to make everything doable over the web. I would pay money to be able to work like this with my colleagues.

Is there something I am missing? Is there some reason such software does not already exist? If not, seems like an opportunity to me.