Refactoring-aware versioning in Eclipse

Abstract

To fully support refactorings in a team development environment we have implemented a refactoring-aware repository provider as an extension plug-in to the Java Development Tools in Eclipse. The versioning system treats refactorings as first-class changes described as semantic ac- tions rather than the set of resulting changes scattered over the source tree. We also introduce refactoring-aware merge, which merges refactorings as well as traditional changes utilizing the se- mantics of the refactorings to detect and resolve merge conflicts. It also ensures that the semantic meaning of a refactoring is preserved after the merge.