To tell you Gitto select one version over another (from an unrelated path), you can use one of:
git checkout --ours -- path/to/filegit checkout --theirs -- path/to/file
See the git checkoutman page for more details .
Regarding the merge marker; I have never seen the added "→ →" without matching "====" and "<<<<". Are you sure this was not done after trying to manually resolve the conflict?
next-release:db/schema.rb , "db/schema.rb" " ".