Zeller, A.---Snelting, G.: Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Vol. 6, 1997, No. 4, pp. 397--440. ... 21  Home/Search   Document Details and Download   Summary   Related Articles   Check

.... approaches based on unification grammars [26, 24, 45, 43, 39, 42] and constraint (logic) programming [3, 5, 28, 47] An interesting recent application lies in software configuration management, where feature logic is used to denote software versions and to deduce their mutual consistency [50, 51]. The first mathematical treatment of record descriptions was the formalisms of y terms [1] In other approaches, y terms were called feature structures [40] or feature terms [46] In contrast to earlier work, the notion feature structure was mostly used for designating a record structure itself ....

Andreas Zeller and Gregor Snelting. Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(4):398--441, October 1997.

....Adele [29] follow this approach. Data model on top of the version model. In this case, the version model is completely orthogonal to the data model and can thus be combined with any data model (e.g. EER, object oriented, or simply files) This solution is realized, e.g. in EPOS [15] and ICE [30]. 3.2 D2: Selection of a Delta Representation In the previous section, we have introduced different kinds of deltas, namely, directed, embedded, and selective ones. Each of these has been used successfully, e.g. directed deltas in RCS, embedded deltas in POEM [31] and selective deltas in DSEE ....

....a new revision instead) In contrast, a bug report may be added without enforcing the creation of a new revision (which would be senseless since the bug refers to the already existing revision) Finally, there are multiple realization variants for each interface revision. 4.1. 4 ICE ICE [41] [30] is a research prototype which applies deductive database technology to SCM. The data model is orthogonal to the version model. So far, the ICE implementation supports file based data that is accessible through a virtual file system interface. Selective deltas are used at the base layer of the ICE ....

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A. Zeller and G. Snelting, "Unified Versioning through Feature Logic," ACM Trans. Software Eng. and Methodology, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 397-440, Oct. 1997.

....use varying techniques and infrastructure for software development. Potential reusable software components are therefore often entangled in project or institute specific configuration management (CM) systems [40, 112] or depend on local software. Since standardization in CM systems is lacking [112, 151] and because build processes are often not portable [7] reuse of these components over project and institute boundaries is difficult [83] This hampers collaborative software development. be removed in order to promote collaborative software development 1.5.3 Granularity Fine grained ....

....and system assembly with source code component reuse. Components are developed individually; compositions of components form systems, which are assembled to form software bundles (self contained software systems) distributed as source. This is because: i) standardization of CM systems is lacking [112, 151]; ii) control over build processes of third party components is restricted; iii) expertise on building the system and its constituent components might be unavailable. Summarizing, to increase reuse of source code components, source tree composition should be made more generally applicable. This ....

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A. Zeller and G. Snelting. Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(4):398--441, 1997.

....formalisms originally developed in [10] These models are directed at domain analysis, however, and are not directly used for implementation. Rather, such mod els suggest where in the system the implementor should construct variation points to deal with anticipated or unanticipated variants. In [16] another feature modeling is addressed, which uses feature logic to reason about collections of components and their properties. Basic support for timeline variability is addressed in [13] They use partial evaluation techniques of components parameters to choose between compile time and run time ....

A. Zeller and G. Snelting. Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(4):398--441, Oct. 1997.

....and Adele [29] follow this approach. Data model on top of the version model. In this case, the version model is completely orthogonal to the data model and can thus be combined with any data model (e.g. EER, object oriented, or simply files) This solution is realized e.g. in EPOS [15] and ICE [30]. Requirement 1 (Generality) UVM must be general with respect to both product space and version space, i.e. it must put no restrictions on the items to be versioned and the way their version spaces are organized. Requirement 2 (Deltas) UVM has to employ deltas to store versions efficiently, ....

....interface object is available. Versioned attributes are fur ther classified into modifiable and immutable ones. For example, the header file is immutable, while the set of bug reports may grow gradually. Finally, there are multiple realization variants for each interface revision. ICE [41] [30] is a research prototype which applies de ductive database technology to SCM. The data model is orthogonal to the version model. So far, the ICE implementation supports file based data that is accessible through a virtual file system interface. Selective deltas are used at the base layer of the ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Andreas Zeller and Gregor Snelting, "Unified Versioning through Feature Logic," ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 397-440, Oct. 1997.

....throughout its implementation, functionality related to its policy (such as the rules for updating a version tree or selecting artifacts) could not be easily extracted for reuse and had to be reimplemented in Subversion. A number of projects have attempted to address this issue. EPOS [8] and ICE [21], for instance, provide logic based infrastructures upon which to implement new configuration management systems by specifying their policies as logical constraints. Another approach, NUCM [16] provides a programmatic approach that reuses a generic repository and supports implementation of ....

....a particular policy, research has shown how certain policies can be emulated with other models. For instance, the change sets policy can be supported using the model for the change package policy [20] Generalizations of this approach provide generic models that support a wide variety of policies [1,16,19,21]. In sacrificing efficiency for generality and expressiveness, these generic models can be used for the exploration and evaluation of new policies [15] Once a desired policy has been determined, it may need to be reimplemented in an optimized fashion with a specialized model should efficiency be ....

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A. Zeller and G. Snelting, Unified Versioning through Feature Logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 1997. 6(4): p. 398441.

.... incompatibilities, requirements) Boolean expressions containing options determine the visibility of a logical change [Wes01] The product structure (called product space) becomes completely independent from the versioning structure (called version space) Recently, Zeller and Snelting [Zel97] have explored similar approaches in their ICE prototype, using feature logic to express the version rules. Many attempts have been made at offering fully versioned databases including Damokles OODBMS [Dit87] and ObjectStore [Lam91] Pure change set systems do not work well in practice for ....

....system models Extending and generalizing versioning capabilities clearly has been a core topic of SCM research since its early beginnings. Much work has been dedicated to advanced versioning models and associated selection techniques, including interesting formalizations of these approaches [Bie95, Nav96, Zel97]. From a researchers point of view, these approaches improve over the current state of the art by offering new or alternative modeling capabilities. From a practitioner point of view, however, some of these approaches are overkill: they provide more power than actually needed, at a cost of extra ....

Andreas Zeller and Gregor Snelting. Unified Versioning through Feature Logic, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(4):397-440, Oct. 1997.

....available for SOFA components. Lastly, issues of branching are discussed. 3. 1 Basic Concepts One role of versioning is identification: to identify di#erent versions (revisions and variants [10] of software elements so that it is possible to specify which ones can form consistent configurations [2, 11, 36, 52, 26]. This is done by assigning a version identification, usually a revision number and variant description in various forms, to the software elements forming the given version. The goal of maximum automation support in SOFA versioning requires that the identification values have a clear, precise ....

..... frame Logger rev (1,1,1) change (init, init, init) rev (2,1,2) change (spec, none, spec) Figure 4. 1: Hierarchy of SOFA Element Revisions in a Namespace Variant identification is based on the model described in [17] However, the chosen representation of variant data is feature logic [52] because of its expressive power and ease of understanding. For one component, the variant data is defined as a set of key value pairs. SOFAnode implementation must then ensure that there exists a mapping from this set into a single place in the component repository where the corresponding ....

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Zeller, A., Snelting, G,: Unified Versioning through Feature Logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 6(3), July 1997.

....and design patterns [1] Our abstract factory proposal can be used for any of their techniques, and addresses the issue of packaging the variability in the most suitable way. The use of attributed features to describe configured and versioned sets of components is covered by Zeller and Snelting [21]. They deal with configuration management only: an interesting area of future research is to integrate their feature logic with the feature descriptions of FODA and FDL. 6.3 Discussion and Future Work There is a relation between the features as selected for a particular product instance and the ....

A. Zeller and G. Snelting. Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(4):398--441, 1997.

....and design patterns [1] Our abstract factory proposal can be used for any of their techniques, and addresses the issue of packaging the variability in the most suitable way. The use of attributed features to describe configured and versioned sets of components is covered by Zeller and Snelting [20]. They deal with configuration management only: an interesting area of future research is to integrate their feature logic with the feature descriptions of FODA and FDL. 6.3 Discussion and Future Work There is a relation between the features as selected for a particular product instance and the ....

A. Zeller and G. Snelting. Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(4):398--441, 1997.

....reusable software components by separating reusable from specific code and by introducing abstractions for concrete solutions. This is similar to our approach where source packages are split of as soon as customer specific functionality is considered to be suitable for general use. Feature logic [14] forms a formal foundation for SCM versioning concepts. Feature logic is used to denote sets of components by their features and to describe the 10 semantics of SCM operations. We are currently investigating whether the composition and configuration operations that are performed by autobundle can ....

....currently further investigating the use of feature descriptions for deriving product configuration tool support. Moreover, we are elaborating the theoretical foundations, via an analysis of the relation with Snelting and Zeller s work on using feature logic for formalizing configuration management [14]. In addition to that, we are further expanding our experience in using the techniques and methods described. In particular, we will continue to use our techniques on the DocGen product line. We invite practioners reading this article to experiment with our tools and ideas, and to contact us to ....

A. Zeller and G. Snelting. Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(4):398--441, 1997. 13

....the privacy of the user while providing authentication to the software vendor) Our goal is to adapt these techniques for use in software configuration management. Languages Automatic configuration management hinges on an expressive description language. Current configuration management languages [7, 12, 3] are adequate for describing manifests and configuration rules. But they completely ignore security requirements such as authentication, delegation, etc. Our goal is to introduce such security policy capabilities into configuration management languages, based on the capabilities provided by ....

Andreas Zeller and Gregor Snelting. Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, July 1997. 10

....build knowledge) needs to be untangled [7, 28] Source tree composition is further complicated when third party components are reused, when the resulting system has to be reusable itself, and when it has to be distributed as source. This is because: i) standardization of CM systems is lacking [28, 32]; ii) control over build processes of third party components is restricted; iii) expertise on building the system and its constituent components might be unavailable. Summarizing, to increase reuse of source code components, source tree composition should be made more generally applicable. This ....

....multiple versions of a single package. When dependency resolution signals that different versions of a package are required, the package normalization process should decide which version to bundle. Essential for package normalization is compatibility between different versions of a package (see [31, 9, 32] for a discussion of version models) In accordance with [27] we require backwards compatibility to make sure that a particular version of a package can always be replaced by one of its successors. When backwards compatibility of a package cannot be satisfied, a new package (with a different ....

A. Zeller and G. Snelting. Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(4):398--441, Oct. 1997.

....[11] or legal databases [29] only a limited amount of support is available. A third reason is that existing CM systems are based on certain underlying assumptions# if new approaches are developed that are in conflict with some of these assumptions (e.g. the approach based on feature logic [53]) little help is available to implementthem. Already a daunting task in and of itself, the construction of a CM system is further complicated by the fact that manyoftoday s projects are carried out in a distributed fashion. In these projects, multiple collaborating participants are physically ....

A. Zeller and G. Snelting. Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(4):398--441, October 1997. 51

....spite of many contributions to finding a way how to manage (large) software systems which evolve, researching a framework for unified version model which integrates extensional and intensional versioning, state based and change based versioning, revisions and variants, etc. remains on the agenda [4, 15]. Although we can consider a hypertext document as a software system (and consequently apply principles of SCM to versioning and configuration management of hypertext documents) there are several specific features of hypertext documents which deserve attention when efficient CM is to be ....

A. Zeller and G. Snelting. Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(4):397--440, 1997. This article was processed using the LT E X macro package with LLNCS style

.... e.g. choose a state based versioning (variants and revisions) or a change based versioning (conditional compilation with more liberal delta combinations) The two authors have proposed a unifying version model in [CW97a] capable of supporting both state and change based versioning (see also [ZS97] for a closely related approach) but limited experience exists. ffl Q1.3: Is it possible to unify classic versioning (unplanned changes) with generics and parameterization (planned changes) For instance, could the latter be seen as database queries using an open ended set of versioning ....

Andreas Zeller and Gregor Snelting. Unified Versioning through Feature Logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(4):397--440, October 1997. epos/papers/scm99-pos-paper.tex 9

....distributed software configuration over the internet. In this section, we give a list of issues that arise in this context, and are central to our research. Languages Automatic configuration management hinges on an expressive description language. Current configuration management languages (CML) [11, 18, 2] are adequate for describing manifests and configuration rules. But they completely ignore security requirements such as authentication, delegation, etc. Our goal is to introduce such security features into CMLs. We take an approach to CMLs as being based on an object oriented data model (OODM) ....

Andreas Zeller and Gregor Snelting. Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, July 1997. 11

....data representations. Thus, a more sophisticated conversion may have to be carried out between the data format used in the repository and the data format requested by the tool in its workspace, and vice versa. Recently, virtual file systems have become popular in SCM. Clearcase [25] ICE [44], and n DFS [15] are some examples of SCM systems which provide the tools with a virtual workspace. e.g. Clearcase allows Unix and NT users to transparently access the repository through their native file systems. In many EDM settings, however, such facilities are not offered. For instance, the ....

.... and their combination constraints (so called version rules) Thus, an n dimensional grid is appropriate to represent the version space (with each axis corresponding to one attribute) Examples of SCM systems based on SCCS RCS are DSEE [26] and its successor Clearcase [25] while EPOS [32] and ICE [44] have their roots in conditional compilation. Virtually all EDM systems are based on version graphs. Remarkably, alternatives to version graphs are not mentioned in Katz s paper at all. Both revisions and variants of individual components can be represented in version graphs. However, ....

A. Zeller and G. Snelting. Unified Versioning through Feature Logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(4):397--440, Oct. 1997. This article was processed using the L A T E X macro package with LLNCS style

....it away. In the GCC example, one could try to replace arithmetic expressions by constants, or program blocks by no ops; HTML input could be reduced according to HTML structure rules. Besides grammars, changes may also be constrained by explicit change constraints, as established in version control [10]. Optimization. In general, the abstract description of the Delta Debugging algorithms leaves a lot of flexibility in the actual implementation and thus provides hooks for several domainspecific optimizations: The implementation can choose how to partition the difference into subsets i ....

Andreas Zeller and Gregor Snelting, "Unified versioning through feature logic," ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 398--441, Oct. 1997.

....interferences, inconsistencies, and granularity. Our future work will concentrate on avoiding inconsistencies by exploiting domain knowledge. Most simple configuration management archives enforce that each change implies all earlier changes; we want to use full fledged constraint systems instead [11]. Another issue is to use syntactic criteria in order to group changes by affected functions and modules. The most complicated, but most promising approach are semantic criteria: Given a change and a program, we can determine a slice of the program where program execution may be altered by ....

ZELLER,A.,AND SNELTING, G. Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 6, 4 (Oct. 1997), 398--441.

.... in CLEARCASE [18] or ADELE [9] The organization of versions (or changes) within an SCM system, the version model, has considerable impact on the way users interact with an SCM system [5] Although it has been shown that all existing versioning models can be unified to applying constrained changes [37], the quest for user friendly and intuitive SCM interaction continues. A still open problem is how to identify and denote consistent configurations in presence of multiple variants. So far, systems like ICE [36] or CMA [24] are confined to lab use only. On the other hand, one must ask whether ....

ZELLER, A., AND SNELTING, G. Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 6, 4 (Oct. 1997), 398--441.

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Zeller, A.---Snelting, G.: Unified versioning through feature logic. ACM transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Vol. 6, 1997, No. 4, pp. 397--440. ... 21

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A. Zeller and G. Snelting, Unified Versioning through Feature Logic. ACM TOSEM, 1997. 6(4): p. 398-441.

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A. Zeller, G. Snelting, "Unified Versioning Through Feature Logic", ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodologies, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 398-441, 1997.

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A. Zeller and G. Snelting. Unified Versioning through Feature Logic. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(4):398 -- 441, 1997. 7

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