At NIME we have a large archive of the conference proceedings, but we do not (yet) have a proper repository for instrument designs. For that reason I took part in a workshop on Monday with the aim to lay the groundwork for a new repository: NIMEhub: Toward a Repository for Sharing and Archiving Instrument Designs [PDF] This workshop will explore the potential creation of a community database of digital musical instrument (DMI) designs.

For a project I am working on I have to use Mercurial for version control. Mercurial, as opposed to CVS, SVN, GIT, etc., does not rely on a server-client model, and can be set up easily on a local system. It is written in python, is lightweight and portable, and so far seems to work fine. To get started I read through the official introduction, then a little more advanced introduction, and I have the definitive guide around as a reference.