CVSSearch: searching through source code using CVS comments

Abstract

CVSSearch is a tool that searches for fragments of source code by using CVS comments. CVS is a version control system that is widely used in the open source community. Our search tool takes advantage of the fact that a CVS comment typically describes the lines of code involved in the commit and this description will typically hold for many future versions. In other words, CVSSearch allows one to better search the most recent version of the code by looking at previous versions to better understand the current version. In this paper we describe our algorithm for mapping CVS comments to the corresponding source code, present a search tool based on this technique, and discuss preliminary feedback.