When writing my papers (and for many other things), I have been using some kind of version control software since about 1999. Among other things, what version control does is to allow you to preserve as many intermediate versions of your work as you want; any time I reach a point that I may want to preserve, a suitable command indicates that the current state of things must be remembered. Later on, it is also easy to recover those intermediate stages, and/or to compare one of them to the current state of the work (or indeed to compare two of the previous stages directly). In particular, it is useful to tag a paper as soon as it is submitted for publication. Then, even if I make changes or corrections while waiting for the refereeing process to slowly snail itself to send a report back, it remains very easy to look back (one, two, three or four years later) to check what was the exact text I had sent to the journal.
Version control is of course also particularly useful when collaborating because no amount of mistyping can lead to a situation where local changes by me erase a brilliant ten page development by a co-author (well, not really, since it is a theorem that for any computer there is a finite combination of letters which, typed properly, will erase everything on it…). It was particularly useful when I was translating into English a friend’s book on methods of mathematics for physicists. We both had the software configured so that any changes could be communicated to the other by asking the software for what had changed between our local copy and the reference version it controls. Since there were around a hundred source files for this book, including copies of the French original and of the (sometimes partially translated) English versions, plus figures, control files, etc, this was really convenient.
It is unfortunately not so trivial to set up version control, which is more commonly used by computer scientists for their projects (source code replacing LaTeX files). It should be fairly easy for a university to offer this as a service to its faculty (ETH, for instance, has something like this for software — anyone can register a software project at origo.ethz.ch and this platform provides all that is needed, including version control, bug tracker, forums for interaction with users, access control for closed-source projects, wiki,…) but it doesn’t seem to be common for more academic work. (It could of course be a good project to adapt the system to this type of situation).
After moving to ETH, the setup I had been using in Bordeaux for about 8 years was not easily reproducible, and it took me a while here in Zürich to arrive at a smooth operation. (It’s still not quite as nice as before, but it’s getting there). I use the svn software for version control (with Linux), mostly for historical reasons (I know there are many other options). For local work on a single computer, the setup would be quite simple, but part of the point of this exercise is that I can keep multiple copies of my (past and present) work on different computers, and continue writing any paper on any of them, submitting the changes to a central server from which they can be recovered on all the others (this is useful also for backup, and during travels; if I make changes on some important files on my laptop during a conference or a visit to wonders of the earth, I can usually expect to be able to save it to the central server when I have internet access, and thus avoid losing too much if the laptop is destroyed or stolen — which has happened to me once…).
The main configuration issue is to have this server accessible from other computers in a semi-permanent manner. My setup in Bordeaux did not translate well to Zürich (partly for reasons of complexity and having forgotten part of the operating procedure…) However, the following works fine for the moment: I use a VPN connection to ETH to connect to the internet, which provides an IP address visible from the outside, even from behind a router/firewall. Then dyndns allows me to keep a permanent URL to access the server (which runs on an Apache web server with the required SVN module to permit access, and fortunately I just had to copy the old configuration file to make this work…)
