hi u7, congrats on the first thread in the gamma forum!
although you can patch a whole project in one file, you are free to split the project into several files that reference each other according to the workflow of your team. for example have one main file that references different files (per component or team member responsibility) and some “project core library” files that contain utils and other common things which gets referenced by all files.
in that way you reduce git conflicts to a minimum. of course you will still get some conflicts when several team members work on e.g. the main file or the core files. this is currently not easy with XML and we are aware of this problem and working on it. we are considering a visual diff plugin for git, as well as YAML as file format which is much better to read for humans and doesn’t need a closing tag like XML or JSON do. mostly the closing tag is a problem for diffs and generates conflicts.
another thing to note is, if you have a big VL document and two team members work on different patches without changing the XML structure, git merges the files properly without conflicts.