Question

When a simple refactoring like “rename field” has been done on one branch it can be very hard to merge the changes into the other branches. (Extract method is much harder as the merge tools don’t seem to match the unchanged blocks well)

Now in my dreams, I am thinking of a tool that can record (or work out) what well defined refactoring operations have been done on one branch and then “replay” them on the other branch, rather than trying to merge every line the refactoring has affected.

see also “Is there an intelligent 3rd merge tool that understands VB.NET” for the other half of my pain!

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Also has anyone try something like MolhadoRef (blog article about MolhadoRef and Refactoring-aware SCM), This is, in theory, refactoring-aware source control.

Answer 1

You could use coccinelle to do the same kind of refactoring operations on different branches. It will not record or figure out what is being done by itself, you have to explicitly tell it what to do, but other than that it will more or less effortlessly do the same refactoring on as many branches you point it to.

This tool have been used in the linux kernel for updating API usage etc.

To quote from its web page:

“Coccinelle is a program matching and
transformation engine which provides
the language SmPL (Semantic Patch
Language) for specifying desired
matches and transformations in C code.”