An Abstraction for Version Control Systems

ions over version control have been built in various contexts. The wider context of Software Configuration Management (scm) has seen research on establishing general principles of change in software, but not with the intent of building an interface for multiple existing vcss. Some research in the field of version control exists that aims to provide an abstraction for version control concepts. Finally, several implementations exist that aim to address this goal to some extent. This chapter analyzes both the work established in the scientific community as well as concrete implementation and relates both of them to Pur. 7.1 Software Configuration Management Several attempts to capture general principles of change in software exist within the wider research field of Software Configuration Management (scm). scm is concerned with the control of the evolution of complex systems [Est00], which version control is an important part of [MWE10]. In [CW98], a taxonomy of fundamental version control concepts is established and existing scm systems are categorized using this taxonomy. The taxonomy is not built with the intent of establishing an implementable interface, but with the goal of identifying methods to describe configurations of versioned artifacts through rules, so called intensional versioning. As such, a large and diverse number of scm systems are compared. The resulting taxonomy covers a broad range of version control concepts. It identifies representations and relations of concepts both for objects being versioned, the so called product space, and objects that represent the versioning, the so called version space. Pur addresses only a fraction of these concepts, but does so with a different intent. A taxonomy for change in software is presented in [BMZ+05]. This taxonomy is intended to cover a broad range of aspects, including aspects that are related to version control, such as change history, as well as aspects that are often not found in vcss, such as type of change. Unlike Pur, the