Version control of Mathematica notebooks

Question

Mathematica notebooks are, of course, plaintext files -- it seems reasonable to expect that they should play nice with a version-control system (git in my case, although I d

Answer 1

You should only get merge markers if the source control system detects changes to a single line by multiple users.

The source control system adds markers to make if very clear where the conflicts are, and to force you to manually remove them (as you resolve each conflict). There is no way for a source control system to know how to do it automatically for you.

If the file is text, but is designed to be read by a program only, it may have no end of line characters at all (or very long lines). Therefore if multiple people are working on such a file you'll get many merge conflicts.

I'm not familiar with the nb file format, but in general the solution to this problem is to ensure only one person is working on a file at a time (ie use an exclusive check-out mode for nb files).