We have a GIT repository with many contributors, and we constantly run into merge conflicts with the release notes file. Is there a good way to prevent them?
I was thinking of a git post-upload server hook that would run run on master branch only, and use a script to extract some magic keyword from the commit message and append following text to the release notes file. Are there any tools for that? Is that a good approach?
I don't know if there is such a tool, but if you need to attach information on a particular commit, I would recommend using git notes, in order to not modify the SHA1.
You could add information like the one suggested in "How do I show just the names and commit titles since a tag in git?".
Any automated processing of said commit messages supposes they are following a strict format (like that article illustrates), which should then be enforced by a pre-commit hook (or at least one pre-receive hook on the remote side).
