Integrating source code search into git client for effective retrieving of change history

Abstract

In order to achieve effective development management, it is important to manipulate and understand the change histories of source code in a repository. Although general version control systems provide change history manipulation, these systems are restricted to line-based and textual operations such as grep and diff. As such, these systems cannot follow the syntax/semantics of the source code. While various studies have examined querying and searching source codes, these methods cannot follow historical changes. The key concept of this paper is the integration of a source code search technique into Git commands that manipulate historical data in a repository. This paper presents MJgit, a prototype tool for achieving the above goal. In order to evaluate the proposed tool, we conducted a performance experiment using actual software repositories.