See the official page for BIC and MNI software.
I used to maintain release notes for some of the BIC software, but that's all ancient history now. If you have any questions, please use the minc-users mailing list.
Maintainability is probably the most important goal for code.
I'd like to find a nice toolkit to write quick'n'dirty (but robust, if that's not a contradiction) parsers in a language like python. Probably the Python String-SIG page is the place to start.
John Aycock's paper Compiling Little Languages in Python deals with this topic. Martin v. Löwis wrote a paper, Towards a Standard Parser Generator, describing the experience of using the packages YAPPS and SPARK in writing a python-based parser.
Jack Crenshaw has a large series of articles on parsing, as seen by a physicist.
Before starting to use CVS, I recommend copying this .cvsrc file into your home directory. It contains the most useful default set of switches for several commands.
I also recommend reading the CVS manual (info cvs), and
visiting the searchable FAQ pages.
There's lots more info starting at Pascal Molli's CVS Bubbles site,
including links to
tutorials and other stuff.
And don't forget about cvs --help.