To mitigate the problem of unhelpful subversion conflicts, you can adopt the convention of newlines at the end of sentences. (This also makes it easier to rearrange or comment out, or comment on, sentences.)
As for comments to each other in the text source, I find it's better to make those appear in the pdf document but have the ability to turn them off for the final version. I use a macro "kibitz
" for that. To use it, put the following at the top of the document:
\newcount\Comments % 0 suppresses notes to selves in text
\Comments=1 % TODO: set to 0 for final version
\documentclass{article} % or whatever your documentclass
% for comments
\usepackage{color}
\definecolor{darkgreen}{rgb}{0,0.5,0}
\definecolor{purple}{rgb}{1,0,1}
% \kibitz{color}{comment} inserts a colored comment in the text
\newcommand{\kibitz}[2]{\ifnum\Comments=1\textcolor{#1}{#2}\fi}
% add yourself here:
\newcommand{\alice}[1]{\kibitz{red} {[ALC: #1]}}
\newcommand{\bob}[1] {\kibitz{purple} {[BOB: #1]}}
\newcommand{\carol}[1]{\kibitz{cyan} {[CAR: #1]}}
\newcommand{\deb}[1] {\kibitz{darkgreen}{[DEB: #1]}}
\newcommand{\evan}[1] {\kibitz{blue} {[EVN: #1]}}
Then Alice, for example, can just stick something like \alice{Bob must've added the previous sentence which is obviously false.}
and it will show up in red in the pdf as long Comments
is set to 1.