Is it possible to tell git to ignore certain lines when doing merge or rebase?

Question

Lets say I have an origin called myorigin and a clone called myclone. I want to keep myclone updated with myorigin changes. In myorigin I have a file which content is:

Name: myorigin
some text
some more text

and after cloning I modify this file in myclone as follows:

Name: myclone
some text
some more text

When in myclone I do:

git fetch
git merge origin

it will tell me there are conflicts.

Is there any way to tell git to ignore certain lines?

Should I approach it differently?

Answer 1

You can write your own merge drivers, or write a set of clean and smudge filters, so that Git doesn't do this merge, or doesn't see this line. But in general, no, there is no simple way to do what you are suggesting.

As a general rule, any sort of "configuration" data should not be committed to the source repository itself. Instead, if it's appropriate, the source repository should contain a sample configuration, and the actual configuration is kept elsewhere (either .gitignore-d, or outside of the work-tree entirely).

If configurations need to be upgraded when the user goes from "FooBarix Version 1.3" to "FooBarix Version 2.0", the 2.0 version should probably include a configuration-migration program that gets run during the upgrade, saving the original configuration and switching to a new configuration (none of which are source-controlled as part of FooBarix itself). This also provides the ability to downgrade the configuration, should it prove necessary to back out of 2.0 back to 1.3.