Topology Awareness for Distributed Version Control Systems

Software development using distributed version control systems has become more frequent recently. Such systems bring more flexibility, but also greater complexity to manage and monitor the multiple existing repositories as well as their myriad of branches. In this paper, we propose DyeVC, an approach to assist developers and repository administrators in identifying dependencies among clones of distributed repositories. It allows understanding what is going on around one's clone and depicting the relationship between existing clones. DyeVC was evaluated over open source projects, showing how they could benefit from having such kind of tool in place. We also ran an observational study and a benchmark over DyeVC, and the results were promising: it was considered easy to use and fast for most repository history exploration operations, while providing the expected answers.