Extensible language-aware merging

Abstract

Parallel development has become standard practice in software development and maintenance. Though almost every revision control and configuration management system provides some form of merging for combining changes made in parallel, these mechanisms often yield unsatisfactory results. The authors present a new merging algorithm, that uses a fast differencing algorithm and renaming analysis to provide better merge results. The system is language aware, but not language dependent and does not require a special editor so it can be easily integrated in current development environments.