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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13813 |
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Table of Contents:
- Merging is a core operation in version control systems such as Git, but traditional line-based algorithms often yield spurious conflicts, particularly in the presence of refactorings or parallel edits. While syntax- and semantics-aware merging approaches can reduce conflicts, they introduce drawbacks such as loss of formatting, dependence on language-specific parsers, and limited flexibility across heterogeneous artifacts. To address this gap, we present Summer, a novel textual token-based merge algorithm independent of document formats. Dividing text into tokens, our approach formulates token-level changes in one branch into string-rewriting rules and move rules, and applies these rules to the text of the other branch to construct a merge. Despite being independent on programming languages, our move rules model extracting and inlining functions. We evaluated Summer on ConflictBench, a large benchmark of real-world merge scenarios, comparing it with five pioneering merge tools across Java and non-Java files. Experimental results show that Summer achieved the highest 36% accuracy in reproducing merges verbatim identical to developers', and ranked second in semantic accuracy.