Consider a different way to manage the CHANGELOG

[asomers]

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The CHANGELOG file is by far our biggest source of merge conflicts. It would be great if we could fix that. One approach would be that taken by https://github.com/saltstack/salt . They use a changelog directory, and each PR adds a file to that directory whose name indicates whether it is a change, addition, removal, or fix. Then when preparing a release, all the files get combined into the CHANGELOG. That eliminates merge conflicts.

[rtzoeller]

merge=union ought to solve this (it's why a local rebase resolves the issue automatically), but GitHub doesn't seem to support it.

I found https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/487 on this topic, but it appears there is a better way to submit feedback requests now. I've created https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/9288 as an official request to support merge=union in .gitattributes files when conflicts arise in PRs.

[asomers]

Using merge=union solves the problem whenever git would complain about a merge conflict. But there's another problem too, when git doesn't complain about a merge conflict. That happens when somebody opens a PR against one release of Nix, then we publish a new release, and they rebase their PR putting the CHANGELOG entry into the section for the just-published release. merge=union doesn't help with that.