How to avoid git conflicts in a team?

Question

We are some developers who work on same project and we use git for the project. If two or more of us happen to work on same file, we receive git conflicts which are hard to

Answer 1

Ordering.

There are a few other things you can do that might help too. It will be clearer if I post them separately.

Where you insert new things will help determine whether you create conflicts.

Imagine a list of names of employees

Andy, 
Oliver, 
Ivan,

Then Brad and Patrick join and their names are added to the list. You add Brad and I add Patrick. We both add the names to the bottom of the list, and then use git to merge our lists. The result will be familiar to git users :-

Merge branch 'Patrick' into Brad

Conflicts:
    names.txt

@@@ -1,4 -1,4 +1,8 @@@
  Andy, 
  Oliver, 
  Ivan,
  <<<<<<< HEAD
 +Brad,
  =======
+ Patrick,
  >>>>>>> Patrick

Now suppose we had done the same thing but imposed a simple alphabetical ordering rule on our list. Now when we come to merge the two branches the results are a little more pleasing :-

Andy,
Ivan,
Oliver,

Add one name yourself and then merge the other person's change with git, to add the other name.

Auto-merging names.txt
Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.
 names.txt | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

And we get

Andy,
Brad,
Ivan,
Oliver,
Patrick,

Since we don't know who is going to join the company next we are effectively adding to the list randomly, and by inserting in random places, conflicts of location in the files are less likely.