[squidfood]

I'm a scientist who does lots of code. Most of my "projects" are 1000 lines or less (usually much less) to do a single function or calculation.

Last year I was pulled into my first larger-scale project (about 8 science coders at multiple institutions over 5 years). We were able to produce reasonable, readable code for each other on a file-by-file basis. But Version Control was the worst, worst part. Files emailed back and forth between subgroups that never made it into the tree, edits lost, we all had our own forked version at the end, essentially.

The most telling part was when I emailed both IT in my department and several professors (PIs) on the project, including those that taught "scientific programming", asking about setting up a source repository, if one of them could host one, and NONE of them had any clue what git, subversion, etc. even were, let alone where/how to set something up.

[andreasvc]

You could set up a private BitBucket repo and simply give them the link to a .zip download, while you would enter any code you receive into the repo. It might be unfair that you would have to do all the version control, but it's better than nothing...

[stcredzero]

At one company I worked at, we had EVCS. "Eliott Version Control System." Everyone emailed Eliott change sets and he put them together.