Highlight merge in pull request

Question

If we have a longer lasting feature branch, we should do regular merges from the develop onto the feature branch. Doing so all changes from develop are on the feature branch.

If using pull requests the commits for the merge operation are marked differently within Stash. However, within the diff view it is not possible to distinguish a change from a merge or a direct commit on the feature branch. To figure out the changes for the feature in fast manner, it would be very helpful if the changes introduced by the merge are marked differently.

cofarrell · Accepted Answer

Hi Ivo,

I'm a little confused. If you've created a PR from feature -> develop, then merging changes back into feature should never show up in the diff because they already exist _in_ the target branch, so there's nothing to show.

Are you getting merge conflicts perhaps and the file is now slightly different? Or is the PR actually to a different branch other than develop. Either way I'm afraid there's very little we can do. That diff is showing the changes between the source and target branches, we can't distinguish where they came from. (try running 'git diff source_branch target_branch' to see what I mean).

I'm hoping the problem might be related to your target branch. If you're creating a PR to a different branch other than develop, then my advice is to merge from develop to _that_ branch, and then from the target branch into feature. This will fix your diff from showing all the changes.

Cheers,

Charles