Historinc: A Repository Transformation Tool for Fine-Grained History Tracking

Abstract

Background: Tracking program elements in source code is useful for program comprehension, supporting code edit, and so on. Historage, a history tracking approach based on repository transformation, enables developers to use a familiar interface to track a finer-grained history. Problem: Existing repository transformation tools have performance issues: (1) their transformation steps include the expansion and archiving of snapshots from the object database, and (2) they cannot transform repositories incrementally, which are unsuitable when using them for supporting software development activities. Method: In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a transformation tool, Tool, that reduces the transformation time. We use git-stein, a repository transformation framework based on the recording of the mapping between objects, to suppress unnecessary expansion and archiving of files. In addition, we store the mapping and use it later to support incremental transformation. Preliminary Evaluation: We compared the transformation time of our tool with an existing one. Furthermore, we compared performance when using different kinds of mappings to be stored. As a result, we found that our tool is more than four times faster than the existing tool and that storing object mapping is effective.