I Have a Conflict: What Can I Do?

Abstract

Before I go into anything major in this chapter, I need to cover what conflicts are and how they happen. On the basic level, a conflict occurs when two people are working on the same part of a file at the same time. When the first user commits their code, that commit is fine, because there are no changes to conflict with it. However, when the second user goes to update, then there is a problem. When the versioning system tries to merge the files together, the changes from both users are new and in the same location, so the versioning system gets confused about what goes where; as a result, it creates a conflicted file containing both sets of changes. Conflicts commonly happen when more than one person makes a change to, for instance, a width value in CSS. Since the system doesn’t know which value it should use, it gets confused and conflicts the file.