I'm currently struggling with automatic merges of a semantic versioned node project. In my current setup I have to maintain multiple older (minor) versions of the applications. To ensure that bug fixes in older versions are also applied to newer versions I'm using release branches in combination with bit buckets feature of auto merging. It works great apart from permanent auto merge conflicts with the version of the application that has to be stored in the package.json. Each time an auto merge happens there is a version conflict with the newer release versions.
Is there any way to avoid those merge conflicts? I fiddled around with a custom merging driver (https://gist.github.com/jphaas/ad7823b3469aac112a52), it kind of works but in my opinion there should be an easier solution like storing the version in a dedicated file (e.g .npmversion) and using build in merge drivers.