Adjustable Syntactic Merge of Java Programs
Olaf Leßenich, Sven Apel, Christian Lengauer · 2012
Merging software artifacts while keeping the amount of conflicts at minimum is a difficult task. Several theoretical approaches addressing this problem exist, but due to the lack of implementations applicable in practice, the standard so far is performing line-based, textual merges. The first part of this thesis introduces the topic of merging and one of its main application areas, version control systems. Afterwards, the focus is set on merging techniques, outlining weaknesses and strengths of the respective approaches. In the second part, JDime is presented, an adjustable, syntactic merge tool for Java programs. The internal algorithms and the implementation of the tool are explained. The last part contains an experimental study to evaluate performance and running time of JDime, compared to two other merge engines. Thereafter, the results are analyzed