Re: The ChangeLog and merge conflicts

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Artur Malabarba <bruce.connor.am@gmail.com> writes:

> For this short period of time that I've been trying to help here, there is
> one workflow issue that's really been bugging me: the ChangeLog file causes
> conflicts on every merge.
>
> This pops up in two situations:
>
> 1. I do some work on another branch for a couple of days, while adding a
> ChangeLog entry with each commit. I proceed to merge with master.
>
> 2. Someone submits a patch and is kind enough to include a ChangeLog entry
> in it. As usual, the patch is only applied after (in the very least) a few
> days.
>
> If anything at all has happened between branch/patch creation and the
> merge, a conflict is guaranteed to happen.
> Of course, the reason for this is that every new entry goes at the top of
> the ChangeLog, and every commit is accompanied with an entry.
>
> I'm just wondering whether there's a solution around this that I'm not
> aware of. Is there something I should do differently?
>
> These conflicts aren't complicated at all to solve, but it gets irritating
> to have to fix them every single time.

Take a look for the git-merge-changelog program (the respective Debian
package is called just that).

It's still sort of a nuisance to maintain the corresponding entry in the
top level .gitattributes file (since it is itself under version
control), but at least this works reasonably well for the non-toplevel
ChangeLog file merges.

-- 
David Kastrup