You can go the filesharing route, but would you prefer that over a version control system? Its true you'd have to synch up before editing, but then you can keep track of changes and transfer between the server and on your desktop...
For me, the perceived complexity of CVS and SVN were always what kept me from using VCS, until I found darcs... Its a single 3MB binary, and very simple to setup/use. I think its atleast as easy mounting your SMB/NFS shares...
Darcs site: http://abridgegame.org/darcs/