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
ChangeLogfiles 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.
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 |   | Using version control systems. |
| • Projects |   | Commands for handling source files in a project. |
| • Change Log |   | Maintaining a change history for your program. |
| • Xref |   | Find definitions and references of any function, method, struct, macro, … in your program. |
| • EDE |   | An integrated development environment for Emacs. |
| • Emerge |   | A convenient way of merging two versions of a program. |