Merge conflicts with version numbers in release branches

Hi,

it's a common problem[1,2,3] in Maven (Java) projects and probably in other environments too: You have the version number of your project written in the pom.xml. When one merges changes upwards from the maint branche to master, the version numbers in maint and master are different and cause a merge conflict.

You might think of solutions for easy cases, but think about several releases from the maint branches and several major releases in the same time frame and you will run into merge conflicts.

Still, do you know any best practice how to deal with these? Do you know examples from other language environments that also keep the version numbers under version control and suffer from the same problem? Or is the version number somehow taken from the git tag in your environment?

[1] http://brettporter.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/automatically-resolving- version-conflicts-in-maven-poms-when-merging/ [2] http://bxm-dev.blogspot.ch/2012/05/gitflow-and-maven.html [3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3555160/merging-changes-from-a-maven- relase-branch-yields-conflicts-due-to-changed-versi

Thank you,

Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro