title: Is there a clean way to handle two original git repositories that started with the same content?
body: <p>Say I have two repositories that were created from the same initial content.  For example, if I were using git to manage my apache config files in /etc/apache2 and I ran <code>git init</code> on machine-a and machine-b separately.</p>
  
  <p>I've since made some configuration changes to machine-b that I would like to apply to the configuration on machine-a without overwriting un-common things like hostnames, etc.</p>
  
  <p>If I do this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>machine-a% remote add machine-b ssh://...
  machine-a% git fetch machine-b
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get all the commits on machine-b and GitX shows a wholy disconnected set of commits, as I would expect.</p>
  
  <p>However, if I try to merge any of machine-b's changes I get conflicts on all modified lines.</p>
  
  <p>For my purposes, this is good enough, but I wonder, is there a cleaner solution?</p>