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Title: How to Merge
Proposer: Charles Bailey
Type: Tutorial
Duration: 90 mins
Description:
As we benefit from the increased flexibility and power of source control tools, we find branching cheap and easy.

But having more branches means that we need to merge more often and now we are faced with the prospect of resolving merge conflicts on a more frequent basis.

Some developers, even those very experienced with a single window of code, seem to lose their nerve when faced with side-by-side diffs, 3-way merges and other complex visualisations of a 'simple' merge. The session aims to explore best practices for merging.

• What to merge and when
• Who should be merging
• What an ideal merge should achieve
• Conflict markers - the manual merge
• Using a merge tool - the assisted merge
• Breaking the rules - when a merge isn't intended to retain all changes for all sides

We will be using Git for our examples but much of the information will be applicable to other source control systems, even legacy centralised systems.