try to prevent merge conflicts for pom.xml
diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4cf2927
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+# Do not merge `pom.xml` from older version, as it will typically conflict
+
+pom.xml merge=ours