git merge

Git Merges Gone Wild: When Sass Compiler Settings Diverge

Here's one of those problems you can file away under the umbrella of DevOps problems nobody really wants to think about. In my case, I stumbled accross this problem while looking at two branches with respective SASS changes--although, this can logically happen with any code that needs to be compiled to an output file and has different standards for how to do that. Today I hit a merge conflict, and my merge tool was telling me that every line of local and remote were completely different. It turned out my coworker and I were compiling our SASS to different output standards; the end result was that my merge tool (GitKraken) crashed and I was effectively unable to see which lines of code had actually diverged. Here's how to stop this from happening to you!

Background: Git Merge Gone Awry

There's not a lot to this: my coworker has been working on her branch; I've been working on my own. The time has come for me to merge my branch into my coworker's. I checkout my coworker's branch to run a git merge and this is what happens: the _overrides.scss file merges successfully but the output files fail. Those output files are compiled by a little program I run called Koala--a SASS compiler.