Peaceful Conflict Resolution in Version Control Systems

Speaker: Mathias Rav

Time: 16:15, Thursday 13th of November 2025

Location: 5335-016 (Peter Bøgh Auditoriet, Nygaard)

Abstract: When collaborating on a codebase where several people are working in parallel on different development branches, it often happens that different developers try to edit the same piece of code, which leads to problems when both branches have to be merged into the main codebase.

If git is used to collaborate on the codebase, the first developer to merge the branch has an easy day, and the other developer is met with a merge conflict, which is the technical term used when git was unable to automatically integrate the two sets of changes together.

In this talk, we present a way of thinking about codebase changes that lets us handle merge conflicts in a novel way that is much less of a hair-pulling frustrating experience. By using this new way of thinking, we then develop a new mechanical way to work with branches that makes it easy to split off "refactoring work" from "feature work", such that refactors can be merged early, thus reducing the incidence of merge conflicts.