Meta-models and Infrastructure for Smalltalk Omnipresent History

International audienceSource code management systems record different versions of code. Tool support can then com- pute deltas between versions. However there is little support to be able to perform history-wide queries and analysis: for example building slices of changes and identifying their differences since the beginning of the project. We believe that this is due to the lack of a powerful code meta- model as well as an infrastructure. For example, in Smalltalk often several source code meta- models coexist: the Smalltalk reflective API coexists with the one of the Refactoring engine or distributed versioning system. While having specific meta-models is an engineered solution, it hampers meta-models manipulation as it requires more maintenance efforts (e.g., duplication of tests, transformation between models), and more importantly navigation tool reuse. As a first step to solve this problem, this article presents several source code models that could be used to support several activities and proposes an unified and layered approach to be the foundation for building an infrastructure for omnipresent version browsing