Tell git to merge CHANGELOG.md by combining changes

[pirj]

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22109586/what-is-the-difference-between-union-and-text/22109606#22109606

Discussion

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Before submitting the PR make sure the following are checked:

• Feature branch is up-to-date with master (if not - rebase it).
• Squashed related commits together.
• [-] Added tests.
• [-] Updated documentation.
• [-] Added an entry to the CHANGELOG.md if the new code introduces user-observable changes.
• The build (bundle exec rake) passes (be sure to run this locally, since it may produce updated documentation that you will need to commit).

[bquorning]

I need some time to experiment more with this.

On my machine, git knows full well how to merge two branches each adding "the same" line to the changelog. The question is: Why doesn’t GitHub know how to do this?

[pirj]

Why doesn’t GitHub know how to do this?

Local git config, @bquorning ?

It's quite unfortunate, but there's no way of committing git config for a repo so that GitHub and other developers can benefit from that. But it's possible to commit .gitattributes for the effect of sharing this behaviour to unite certain files during merges.

When deciding what attributes are assigned to a path, Git consults $GIT_DIR/info/attributes file (which has the highest precedence), .gitattributes file in the same directory as the path in question, and its parent directories up to the toplevel of the work tree

Maybe you have .gitattributes in your ~?

There's even a global machine setting that can affect that basing on the OS and distribution:

Attributes for all users on a system should be placed in the $(prefix)/etc/gitattributes file.

[bquorning]

I posted more details in #1417 (comment)