28 Maintaining Large Programs

This chapter describes Emacs features for maintaining medium- to large-size programs and packages. These features include:

• - Unified interface to Support for Version Control Systems (VCS) that record the history of changes to source files.

• - Commands for handling programming projects.

• - A specialized mode for maintaining ChangeLog files that provide a chronological log of program changes.

• - Xref, a set of commands for displaying definitions of symbols (a.k.a. “identifiers”) and their references.

• - EDE, the Emacs’s own IDE.

• - A mode for merging changes to program sources made on separate branches of development.

• - A minor-mode for highlighting bug references and visiting the referenced bug reports in their issue tracker.

If you are maintaining a large Lisp program, then in addition to the features described here, you may find the Emacs Lisp Regression Testing (ERT) library useful (see ERT in Emacs Lisp Regression Testing).

• Version Control
• Working with Projects
• Change Logs
• Find Identifier References
• Emacs Development Environment
• Merging Files with Emerge
• Bug Reference