Revision control in an integrated software development environment

Abstract

We present a graph-based formal approach to revision control that takes consistency relations between revisions of different documents into account. We use a new powerful graph grammar specification language, called PROGRESS, for the rule-based specification of consistency preserving changes to revision graphs. In addition to coarse-grained relations between revisions, we also deal with fine-grained relations between increments which belong to revisions of different documents. Our work provides the formal basis for the construction of a syntax-directed hypertext editor which supports control of revisions and their interrelations.