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Myself, I'd be perfectly happy with Git or Mercurial, but I'm tying to identify a version control system which all our Windows admins could use for sharing script code, meeting the following requirements:

  • distributed, i.e. we want a central repository where users can clone or fork from
  • GUI on Windows (bonus points for Explorer integration like the TortoiseCVS forks)
  • Windows-friendly installation (e.g. msysgit's OpenSSH or PuTTY configuration disqualifies it)
  • easy to understand, i.e. the end users probably do not know or use terms like trunk, branch, and tag, and ideally would never need to
  • integrates with popular text/code editors like Notepad++ (this is not a must-have, but would be a real plus)

Maybe I'm asking too much, but there must be some usable VCS out there to fit the bill!

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Some thinking

  1. I can't see any strong reasons in your use-case for DVCS (i.e. reasons for cloning-merging instead of personal "shelves")
  2. Friendly installation: for admins (even Windows-admins must have brain and easy understand "OpenSSH or PuTTY configuration")?

Ideas

You can see at Smart* products from Syntevo (Full-size GUI, not pure shell-extensions /but have shell-extension also/). Beware - Java! SmartGit have human-brain-friendly config, early versions also have support for Mercurial

For editors with SCM-integration I can suggest EditPlus (not free, but reasonable good price) - support from a box for basic Subversion commands (in a main menu), latest build have added support for TortoiseGit. But - with the help of UserTools virtually any (CLI?) command can be added to EditPlus interface and executed in EditPlus editor-window

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Good points... I guess the only reason I was leaning towards the "distributed" side here is for code sharing--if we all used the same central repository, then it would be easy to grab the latest version of someone else's code. And undoubtedly the Windoze admins on my team all have quite functional brains--what they don't have is a lot of time to learn things they don't recognize as "core" to their daily work. Also, interesting on the Syntevo products--I haven't seem them before, so I'll be interested to test drive.
@ewall - using pure CVCS (Subversion) not contradict the idea of sharing code easy, maybe even do it more transparent. Just see - every admin have some amount of hosts (or services) under control, in case of SVN it translated to hierarchical tree in repo (admin - host - service), sharing is as easy as "checkout URL ...", in case of git/hg with flat namespace each final destination is - branch? separate repo? PS - "All things are in order" is admin core duty from my POV
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I'm not aware of any non-IDE editors on windows other than maybe Emacs and UltraEdit that have version control support. Otherwise, Mercurial really does fill the bill. It's distributed, it has TortoiseHg, it has several options for windows installers (including admin and non-admin installs), and at least when using TortoiseHg, it's relatively easy to understand.

No VCS in the world is going to completely insulate users from its own concepts, but if you don't use branches and tags, the issue isn't going to come up (personally I'd recommend at least learning about tags -- they're easier to work with than raw rev spec hashes). Were you to find some other VCS that isn't one of these mainstream choices, I'd be interested in knowing about it, but chances are you'd also find it was one or more of a) expensive, b) has a vanishingly small community, and c) no sites like sourceforge, google code, or bitbucket to host your projects.

Now for one major alternative: If your users are primarily editing documents, then possibly you want a CMS of some sort, for which you have options ranging from the likes of Drupal, Joomla, and Magnolia, to something simpler like a Wiki. MediaWiki with some syntax hilighting plugins might be just the thing for single-file scripts. This is a centralized solution without any real editor integration however, so I'm not sure it's the workflow you're looking for. There are some wikis based on DVCS's (mostly git) but I find they tend to be the worst of both worlds.

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So far, TortoiseHg has been the front-runner when my colleague and I have discussed it, so I'll take a closer look. The quick-start guide does show some nice advantages over more complex VCS'es in that it's a single install, and that repositories can be shared on a simple network file share. Still I wonder: if we made this "the standard", would people actually take the time to use it? Or does it not matter if it's good enough for the few that will use it? Hrm...
As to your point about a CMS, the need is mostly for single-file scripts, not documents. One idea that I cringe at is a SharePoint document library with versioning and checkin/checkout enabled which might just meet the "lowest common denominator" needs, but it sure would be a pain to use.

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