My team is planning to switch from Perforce to Git and I am trying to find a way to make Git ignore pom version differences between branches. This works well in Perforce and I'm not having any luck reproducing the behavior with Git.

Here are my steps:

1. Checkout parent branch 

```
ndeckard@ws /c/dev/proj/testgit (master)
$ git checkout release/1.0
Switched to branch 'release/1.0'
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/release/1.0'.

```
2. Create child branch from it

```
ndeckard@ws /c/dev/proj/testgit (release/1.0)
$ git branch branch/FEA-650

```
3. Switch over to new branch

```
ndeckard@ws /c/dev/proj/testgit (release/1.0)
$ git checkout branch/FEA-650
Switched to branch 'branch/FEA-650'

```
4. Update child branch pom version

```
<version>1.0.0-FEA-650-SNAPSHOT</version>

```
5. Add it and commit

```
ndeckard@ws /c/dev/proj/testgit (branch/FEA-650)
$ git status
On branch branch/FEA-650
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)

        modified:   pom.xml

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

ndeckard@ws /c/dev/proj/testgit (branch/FEA-650)
$ git add pom.xml

ndeckard@ws /c/dev/proj/testgit (branch/FEA-650)
$ git commit -m "set feature branch pom version"
[branch/FEA-650 59e156e] set feature branch pom version
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

```
6. Switch back to parent branch

```
ndeckard@ws /c/dev/proj/testgit (branch/FEA-650)
$ git checkout release/1.0
Switched to branch 'release/1.0'
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/release/1.0'.

```
7. Merge child branch into parent auto-accepting parent branch version (using the “ours” merge strategy)

```
ndeckard@ws /c/dev/proj/testgit (release/1.0)
$ git merge branch/FEA-650 -s ours
Merge made by the 'ours' strategy.

```
8. Attempt 2nd merge of child into parent (Already up-to-date.) Good. This is what I want

```
ndeckard@ws /c/dev/proj/testgit (release/1.0)
$ git merge branch/FEA-650
Already up-to-date.

```
9. Checkout child and merge parent into child (it fast forwards and sticks the parent branches pom version on the child). Not good. I need it to say "already up-to-date" like above and keep the child branch pom version as it already is on the child branch

```
ndeckard@ws /c/dev/proj/testgit (release/1.0)
$ git checkout branch/FEA-650
Switched to branch 'branch/FEA-650'

ndeckard@ws /c/dev/proj/testgit (branch/FEA-650)
$ git merge release/1.0
Updating 59e156e..2f3a2a0
Fast-forward
pom.xml | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

```

After step 7, I would like merges in either direction between parent and child to say (Already up-to-date.) 

Is there a way with Git to make future merges ignore the version number difference in the pom file between branches?