Figure out how to resolve merge conflicts in lock files

[bendnorman]

Now that we are using lock files, we'll get merge conflicts in pyproject.toml which are manageable and conflicts in our *lock.yml files which are not manageable. We don't want to be resolving dozens of direct and indirect dependency merge conflicts.

This article suggests creating a merge strategy for the lock files. For example, direct dependency A gets upgraded on dev from 0.1 to 0.3 and is upgraded to from 0.1 to 0.2 on a feature branch called feature. Merge dev into feature, and there is a merge conflict in pyproject.toml and a handful of conflicts in conda-lock.yml because the indirect dependencies of dependency A changed. We could set a merge strategy for lock files to always use the lock files from the current branch. The merge conflict in pyproject.toml will be resolved and the lock files may be temporarily out of sync with pyproject.toml. I think this should be ok because when the new resolved pyproject.toml file is pushed to GitHub, the update-conda-lock action will use the new pyproject.toml and clobber the incorrect lock files.

[zaneselvans]

Ahhh, so you can specify a particular merge strategy on a per-file basis.

[jdangerx]

Yeah, this seems like a good way forward!