Ask HN: How often do you have merge conflicts?

I'm a Linux kernel maintainer. Conflicts happen, but git makes the resolution straightforward, and can even try different merge strategies (git merge -X "ours"/"octopus"/etc). I wouldn't ever describe it as having been "merge hell". Maybe if it were a different SCM.<p>Linux has the "linux-next" tree, which merges feature branches together every night; Stephen Rothwell fixes up context conflicts in that tree which saves a lot of time, and the e-mails he generates also function as a notification that the code you're working with has conficts.<p>Having a nightly merge of all feature branches seems like the right kind of granularity of notification to me.

We get them regularly, maybe a couple a week. But for the most part you know what you are getting into. It usually comes up in code review that there's going to be a problem.<p>What I don't get though is how a realtime notification would help me. If my editor started flashing that I was in conflict, what would I do differently?

Small team working on fairly big systems - we rarely have any merge conflicts due to the way we divide work up.<p>They can be a pain in the arse when something has gone wrong though - but it's not really something we spend a lot of time worrying about. If it happens we just deal with it.

Small team (~10) of developers: I rarely encounter merge conflicts due to our method of doling out tasks. We generally try to group tasks together based on similarities, and our codebase is very modular.

Small team manager here -- not often at all. Most people are working on different components simultaneously so conflicts rarely arise.