Question

When the binary files, swfs, jars and flvs are changed locally, and I try to pull in changes, git tries to merge them and reports conflict.

And then, I branch to a temporary branch, and commit the local changed binary files, and merge them back after the pull with recursive theirs strategy. — Too much work.

Is there a way to tell git, not to attempt merging binary files and ask me which one of these versions to use.

Answer 1

You could set up a merge drive in a .gitattributes file (only for a given subtree, only for some file types)

See this question for instance (or this one).

# choose the name of the merge driver to be use for all jar files
echo *.jar merge=keepTheir > dirWithJarFiles\.gitattributes

Declare your merge driver in the config of the Git repo:

git config merge.keepTheir.name "always keep their during merge"
git config merge.keepTheir.driver "keepTheir.sh %O %A %B"

or

git config merge.keepMine.name "always keep mine during merge"
git config merge.keepMine.driver "keepMine.sh %O %A %B"
[merge "keepMine"]
        name = always keep mine during merge
        driver = keepMine.sh %O %A %B

The example I give don’t ask you for a choice but will always keep “mine” (or “yours”) version when merging.
But you could adapt the script executed by this merge driver to ask you a question, and then apply your choice to all merges.