Resolve Conflicts in Git

I am going to tell you something very basic here. These basics are really important though.

Today when I tried to merge one of my branch say phuddu to my master, I got some weired messages from git.

...
ERROR: Merge conflict in app/models/activity.rb
Auto-merging app/models/death_report.rb
...
fatal: merge program failed
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.

Looks like I crashed into a merge conflict today.

My app/models/activities.rb file looked like following.

<<<<<<< .merge_file_sdfPaP
# == Schema Info
=======
# == Schema Information
>>>>>>> .merge_file_LT3vRO
# Schema version: 20090530092020
#
# Table name: activities
#
<<<<<<< .merge_file_sdfPaP
#  id         :integer(4)      not null, primary key
#  item_id    :integer(4)      not null
#  user_id    :integer(4)      not null
#  item_type  :string(255)     not null, default("")
#  created_at :datetime
#  updated_at :datetime
#
=======
#  id         :integer(11)     not null, primary key
#  user_id    :integer(11)     not null
#  item_id    :integer(11)     not null
#  item_type  :string(255)     not null
#  created_at :datetime #  updated_at :datetime
#
>>>>>>> .merge_file_LT3vRO

Every chunk of code above within the

 <<<<<<< 

and

 ======= 

reflects the modifications made by other commiter (Oh! why!! why did you do this?) whereas the code within the

 ======= 

and

 >>>>>>> 

reflects the changes made by me. Now to resolve above conflicts we will edit our files according to the need and do the following.

git update-index <filename>

It actually tells the git that conflicts have been resolved in the files. Now just do a commit and you are done.