Improving context awareness in subversion through fine-grained versioning of Java code

Abstract

In this paper, we present an extension of the Subversion command line to support fine-grained versioning of Java code. To this aim, for each Java file under versioning, an XML-based file representing the logical structure of the original file is automatically built by parsing the code. An additional XML-based file is also built to model collaboration constraints. This information is useful to enrich the context awareness by providing developers information about changes made by others to the same logical unit (i.e., class, method, or attribute) of the Java file. Finally, we present an extension of Subclipse, a Subversion front-end implemented as an Eclipse plug-in, aiming to support the fine-grained versioning in Subversion.