It sounds like the real difficulty is that you can't install these pieces of software on your particular operating system, which all already solve this problem

It sounds like the real difficulty is that you can't install these pieces of software on your particular operating system, which all already solve this problem in a relatively robust and well-tested way. All you should have to do is put together a robust piece of software that installs cleanly on your OS to support revisioning... but this is the same challenge faced by all of the examples you've mentioned. I'm not convinced that you're solving the right problem if the main difficulty lies in installing. In the HCI research community, SVN is the norm, backed by sites like Unfuddle, Github, or private SVN servers. All of these sites let you upload directly through the web.