chore: use npm as a merge tool

[boneskull]

So package-lock.json gets conflicted often enough and this can be a pain.

The following bit in a .gitattributes is used in the appium monorepo:

package-lock.json merge=binary

This is fine, except when confronted with a conflict, Git will just punt; I suppose that's better than the default alternative--which is a poor text merge indeed.

But, I know that the way to resolve these conflicts is to run npm install. I thought; why not just do that?

So this does that -- though it requires a manual step for security reasons.

When Git detects a conflict in package-lock.json, it will run the npm merge tool--which just runs npm install. If npm install exits with a 0 error code and package-lock.json was modified, Git will mark package-lock.json as resolved.

If there's also a conflict in package.json this will not work, because npm install can't run if your package.json is in a conflicted state.

To enable this, the developer has to run

git config --local include.path ../.gitconfig

This modifies .git/config and tells it to include .gitconfig (added). Git will otherwise not recognize the .gitconfig file and the auto-merge of package-lock.json will fail, and you'll have to run npm install yourself as before.

Please try this and see if it's helpful. It might not be.

[boneskull]

Current dependencies on/for this PR:

• main
  • PR chore: use npm as a merge tool #370 👈

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[jlipps]

yeah this is a good idea for an annoying problem!

[boneskull]

@jlipps Did you try it?

[jlipps]

not yet!