MolhadoRef
Danny Dig, Tien N. Nguyen, Kashif Manzoor, Ralph E. Johnson · 2006
Refactoring tools allow programmers to change their source code quicker than before. However, the complexity of these changes cause versioning tools that operate at a file level to lose the history of entities and be unable to merge refactored entities. This problem can be solved by semantic, operation-based SCM with persistent IDs. We propose that versioning tools be aware of program entities and refactoring operations. We present MolhadoRef, our prototype, which uses these techniques to ensure that it never loses history. MolhadoRef can successfully merge edit and refactoring operations which were performed on different development branches.