  This paper presents Tartarian, a tool that supports maintenance of software
with long-running, multi-release branches in distributed version control
systems. When new maintenance code, such as bug fixes and code improvement, is
committed into a branch, it is likely that such code can be applied or reused
with some other branches. To do so, a developer may manually identify a commit
and cherry pick it. Tartarian can support this activity by providing commit
hashtags, which the developer uses as metadata to specify their intentions when
committing the code. With these tags, Tartarian uses dependency graph, that
represents the dependency constraints of the branches, and Branch Identifier,
which matches the commit hashtags with the dependency graph, to identify the
applicable branches for the commits. Using Tartarian, developers may be able to
maintain software with multiple releases more efficiently.
