Project centralization based on graph coloring

Version conflicts are common in a component-based system, where each component is developed and managed independently. Changes during the life-cycle of components require multiple versions to coexist. This creates a challenge in representing multiple versions for program analysis tools and execution platforms that are designed to handle only one version. In this paper, a project centralization approach is proposed to manage the version conflict problem. Our technique shares common code whenever possible while keeping the version space of each component separate. We formalize and transform the project centralization into a graph coloring problem. A corresponding algorithm is also presented. Experiments on real world software projects demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique.