Version Control Systems - Diffing with structure

Abstract

Today's version control systems rely on the Unix diff utilities to detect which lines in a file have been changed and to merge different changes to the same file. Not all such changes, however, are best represented in terms of modifications to lines of code. This may lead to unnecessary conflicts that must be resolved manually by developers. This thesis explores the usage of an alternative algorithm for merging the syntax trees of the programming language Clojure. As a result, a significant number of conflicts drawn from existing Clojure repositories may be merged automatically, providing evidence that tree-based algorithms offer better precision than the traditional line-based approach in determining which changes give rise to conflicts.