Dropbox, not a version control choice

I lately need to work on a program back and forth between Mac OS X and Linux.

So I copied everything into a Dropbox folder, to edit the source code in Linux and compile it in Mac OS X. Then I noticed that something went wrong all the time. Anyway, i could not compile it. The Makefile generated from ./configure was always weird.

But if I used scp to sync files, nothing went wrong.

I don't know the reason yet. But I think it is because how Dropbox handles symbolic links.

In conclusion, don't expect to use Dropbox as a collaborative version control system.

PS: The reason i need to work on Linux and compile the code on Mac OS X is because Mac OS X has not-strong-enough memory protection mechanism. So the code that causes segmentation fault on Linux can run well on Mac OS X. And I don't have time to fix the problem now.

So, conclusion 2: Mac OS X (at least 10.5 or 10.6) isn't as secure as as Linux (at least 2.6 kernel) on memory protection.