Issue with Bitbucket PR: Viewing Unwanted Changes from Base Branch

Question

Hello everyone,

I'm encountering a problem with pull requests (PR) on Bitbucket and I'm hoping to get some insights or solutions from the community.

Here's the scenario:

* I have a branch named feature-1 and I want to create a pull request to merge it into the development branch.
* Ideally, when I open the PR from feature-1 to development, I should only see the new changes introduced in feature-1 that are not yet in development.
* However, Bitbucket's UI is showing changes from the development branch that feature-1 is behind on. This clutters the PR view and makes it hard to review the actual changes from feature-1.

Additionally, I cannot merge the development branch into feature-1 because development contains code from other features that are not needed in feature-1 and could cause conflicts or complications.

Has anyone else faced a similar issue? Is there a workaround or a proper way to configure the PR so that only the new changes from feature-1 are shown?

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

Theodora Boudale · Answer

You are very welcome. Please feel free to reach out if you ever need anything else.

Hakeem Ishak · Answer

Noted, thanks Theodora.

Theodora Boudale · Answer

Hi @Hakeem Ishak and welcome to the community!

Pull request diffs In Bitbucket Cloud are using a three-dot diff. A three-dot diff shows only changes in the source branch starting at a common ancestor of the two branches. You can read more info on this blog post:

* https://bitbucket.org/blog/improving-performance-on-complex-diffs

Changes in the destination branch are not taken into account in this type of diff.

The only way to take into account the destination branch's changes in Bitbucket's PR diff is by merging the destination branch into the source branch or rebasing.

We have a feature request to show the preview-merge diff on demand (that would take into account changes in the destination branch):

* https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-21964

You can add your vote there to express your interest, and you can also add yourself as a watcher if you'd like to get notified via email on updates.

Kind regards,
Theodora