Our team wanted to enable automatic merging since having to do manual merges are kinda annoying. Our branching model is rather simplistic, we only have release branches - one for each month (release/18.1 is released at begin of January, release/18.2 in February; you get the idea).
What we did so far was manually merging the release branches into later versions, and we'd like to avoid that. We enabled the automatic merging feature, and for a while this seemed to work like a charm until a colleague recently wanted to merge something to release/18.3 (but !not! release/18.2), but automatic merge wanted to merge the entire 18.3-branch back to 18.2:
This is NOT what we want... automatic merges should be strictly forward only.
Now, to the question: What kind of setup would we need to achieve that? Is the behavior from above intended, is there an error in our setup?
I toyed around a bit with the settings, but haven't been able to find a solution yet.
If we need to adapt our settings or branch names in any way, we might do that, but we definitely want to stick with having some sort of 'monthly' release branches; a later branch always includes all commits of an earlier branch.
The branches created by the developer can have arbitrary names, usually it's either bugfix/... or feature/..., but we don't enforce that (yet).
Best regards & thanks for any help in advance 
