29 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).