Cannot merge pull request if any changes have been made on the target branch

[Jon Kruger]

We are unable to merge any pull requests if any changes have been made to the target branch.  Here's a basic example that happens every day:

• Two branches are created off of the same commit in the master branch
• Work is done in each branch, and then a pull request is submitted for each one.  The work was done in different areas so there will be no merge conflicts when they are merged in.
• First pull request is merged - merges successfully
• Second pull request is merged - You get an error message that says "New changes were pushed to master in POOL/demo while the merge was being performed.  Please retry the merge."

We are unable to merge pull requests if ANY changes were made to the target branch after the pull request was created.  I would expect it to deny the merge if there were actual merge conflicts, but it happens every time whether there are merge conflicts or not.

We are on Bitbucket Server 5.9.

[Andrei Khudavets · Accepted solution]

Hi Jon,

What happens when you re-try your merge attempt after some time?

There is a known Bitbucket Server issue. When the target branch is updated, Bitbucket starts background re-scoping to update all pull requests opened against this branch. While re-scoping is running, other pull request will fail to merge. 

Here is the issue I am referring to: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BSERV-9709

[Jon Kruger]

I just tried again today and it still doesn't merge.  Is it possible the background re-scoping is failing on our server?  How do we troubleshoot that?

[Andrei Khudavets]

If the problem persists, then something is wrong with the server. I recommend to raise a support request. They will be able to analyse your log files and solve the problem.

[deanlot]

I know this is an old thread, but we experience this often. As this is still indexed on google, I though this might be useful for others.

I found that pushing directly to your target branch resolves this issue. You would need to adjust your settings in the repo to allow direct pushes if you have prevented this.

Eg.

PR from feature/abc -> develop

clicking merge on BB server UI fails with above error.

on local env:

• git checkout develop
• git pull origin feature/abc
• git push

After this, bitbucket will automatically mark the original PR as merged, and you should be able to merge any other PR's now without issue.