If you don't need a distributed system, I'd argue that Subversion is at least as sane as anything else, at least at the plumbing level, once you realize that it is not so much a VCS as essentially a remote file system with atomic multi-file operations, automatic sequentially numbered annotated snapshots after write operations, and near zero cost copy on write copying.
You establish a naming convention on top of that to use it as a VCS. For example, one common such convention is to have directories named "trunk", "tags", and "branches" at the top level, with your projects living in subdirectories under "trunk". Under this convention the way you represent a tag is by simply copying your project directory from trunk/my_project to a new directory named tags/my_project/tagname. Similar for branching...just copy to branches/my_project/branch_name.
Don't like that convention? Develop your own that fits your work better.
> If you don't need a distributed system, I'd argue that Subversion is at least as sane as anything else
Oh my yes. Binary diffs were lovely. Also, support for large assets.
For reproducible data science work, you’re going to need at least code and data. One of those things is a total PIA with git if the data aren’t trivially small.
You establish a naming convention on top of that to use it as a VCS. For example, one common such convention is to have directories named "trunk", "tags", and "branches" at the top level, with your projects living in subdirectories under "trunk". Under this convention the way you represent a tag is by simply copying your project directory from trunk/my_project to a new directory named tags/my_project/tagname. Similar for branching...just copy to branches/my_project/branch_name.
Don't like that convention? Develop your own that fits your work better.