Refactoring-aware Software Configuration Management
Danny Dig, Tien N. Nguyen, Ralph E. Johnson · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2006
Refactoring tools allow programmers to change source code much quicker than before. However, the complexity of these changes cause versioning tools that operate at a file level to lose the history of components. This problem can be solved by semantic, operation-based SCM with persistent IDs. We propose that versioning tools be aware of the pro- gram entities and the refactoring operations. MolhadoRef, our prototype, uses these techniques to ensure that it never loses history.