An editor for revision control

ABSTRACT

Programming environments support revision control in several guises. Explicitly, revision control software manages the trees of revisions that grow as software is modified. Implicitly, editors retain past versions by automatically saving backup copies and by allowing users to undo commands. This paper describes an editor that offers a uniform solution to these problems by never destroying the old version of the file being edited. It represents files using a generalization of AVL trees called “AVL dags,” which makes it affordable to automatically retain past versions of files. Automatic retention makes revision maintenance transparent to users. The editor also uses the same command language to edit both text and revision trees.

REFERENCES

• 1: James E. Archer, Jr. , Richard Conway , Fred B. Schneider, User Recovery and Reversal in Interactive Systems, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.6 n.1, p.1-19, Jan. 1984 [doi>10.1145/357233.357234]
• 2: FRASER, C.W. A compact, portable CRT-based text editor. So{tw. Pract. Exper. 9 (Feb. 1979), 121-125.
• 3: Christopher W. Fraser, A generalized text editor, Communications of the ACM, v.23 n.3, p.154-158, March 1980 [doi>10.1145/358826.358834]
• 4: KERNIGHAN, B.W. A tutorial introduction to the UNIX text editor. In the Unix Programmer's Manual, Seventh Edition, Volume 2A, Bell Labs., Murray Hill, N.J., Jan. 1979.
• 5: Donald E. Knuth, The art of computer programming, volume 3: (2nd ed.) sorting and searching, Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Redwood City, CA, 1998
• 6: Norman Meyrowitz , Andries van Dam, Interactive Editing Systems: Part I, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.14 n.3, p.321-352, Sept. 1982 [doi>10.1145/356887.356889]
• 7: Eugene W. Myers, Efficient applicative data types, Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.66-75, January 15-18, 1984, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States [doi>10.1145/800017.800517]
• 8: PIKE, R. The Blit: A multiplexed graphics terminal. AT&T Bell Lab. Tech. J. 63, 8 (Oct. 1984), 1595-1631, Part 2.
• 9: ROCHKIND, M.J. The source code control system. IEEE Trans. So/tw. Eng. SE-1, 4 (Dec. 1975), 364-370.
• 10: SMITH, D. C., IRBY, C., KIMBALL, R., AND VERPLANK, B. Designing the Star. user interface. Byte 7, 4 (Apr. 1982), 242-282.
• 11: TESLER, L. The Smalltalk environment. Byte 6, 8 (Aug. 1981), 90-147.
• 12: Walter F. Tichy, Design, implementation, and evaluation of a Revision Control System, Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Software engineering, p.58-67, September 13-16, 1982, Tokyo, Japan
• 13: Walter F. Tichy, RCS—a system for version control, Software—Practice & Experience, v.15 n.7, p.637-654, July 1985 [doi>10.1002/spe.4380150703]

INDEX TERMS

Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.7 Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement
          Subjects: Version control

  E. Data
  E.1 DATA STRUCTURES
      Subjects: Lists, stacks, and queues

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Languages, Management