Bitbucket plugin for Visual Studio 2017 errors on pull requests.

[Jason Franks]

I am trying to shift my organization to using pull requests.  I have the plugin installed and working to create and show the pull requests.  But the merge is failing even when there are no conflicts in the merge.  If there are no conflicts in the merge, it actually still happens; but I get the same error. 

When I attempt a merge I get an error of:

"Unknown error.  (Unexpected character encountered while parsing value: {, Path '', line1, position 1.). Check logs for more into.  

When I run VS 2017 in admin with logging enabled I do not see anything unusual except two attempts to " Entering function CVsPackageInfo::HrInstantiatePackage" followed by a begin / end package load.  No errors to follow up on.  

Has anyone else seen this issue, I expected it to bring up the VSDiffMerge tool to complete the merge when there is a conflict.   Do I have something setup wrong, or is this an actual bug in the plugin?

Thanks for any advice...

[Jason Franks]

I would like to thank who ever fixed this issue, the latest version now does a wonderful job at pull requests.  

thank you so much...

[Anup Narang]

@Jason Franks were you able to find a solution? 

[Jason Franks]

Nope, I have not been able to find someone that was willing to take up the charge and fix the plugin.  for us our plan is to just kick any pull request with a merge conflict and demand the submitter resolve the conflict before the pull request.  

This is not optimal and the resolution is usually manually merging files.  This would be way faster to just resolve as part of handling the pull request.  Hopefully I will be able to convince a better programmer than I to see if there is something easy in the code of the plugin that could be updated.

[Ana Retamal]

Hi Jason! After some research looks like this might be an issue on the Visual Studio side, you can read their solution at Visual Studio unable to load package.

If you're still having issues, I'd recommend you to contact their Support forum.

If you have any other questions, please let us know and we'll be happy to help!

Kind regards,

Ana

[Jason Franks]

Ana,

        Thanks for the quick response.  I have a fresh new install of windows 10, VS 2017, Git and the bit bucket plug in.  These are the only items other than OS patches that have been installed, and all settings are default.  

         With this fresh new install, I cloned my repos locally and created a pull request that had no conflicts.  I still get the error, and the pull request merges due to not having any conflicts.  I then make an intentional merge conflict and create a new pull request.  In this situation we do not get the merge to complete, we are able to get to see the conflict, but no way to resolve it using vsdiffmerge or other merge tools.  

         Is there some configuration that I am missing, or additional plugin needed for these to work in harmony?  I will also reach out to the VS community as suggested but wanted to let this group know what I found.  

         Thanks and please let me know if you have any other suggestions to try.

- Jason

[Sasa Vasiljevic]

Hi Jason

Did you resolve your issue? I get exactly the same error.

[Jason Franks]

Sorry to see that others are suffering and its not just a local problem for me. 

Unfortunately the official answer was "its not supported" and a polite your welcome to fix it yourself.  While that would normally be fine in a developer community, I just don't have the skills to work on VS plugins.  But I do think that someone with a little VS plugin experience will be able to resolve the bug quickly. 

The maintainer said they would accept updates if provided but was not in a position to work on it anytime soon.  So looking for someone that would like to take up the project and work out this small bug so that it will work through merge conflicts gracefully during a pull request.  

[Joel Ransom]

I just ran into this. What's interesting is that it actually works, i.e. the pull request is created. I get the same error when I merge it, but the merge works as well. 

If I create a pull request in bitbucket and then merge it with Visual Studio, that doesn't throw any error. 

[Jason Franks]

Joel,

I also found that there were some situations that didn't generate this error and if there were no conflicts the merge happened despite the errors.  However the real issue is not the error that it throws but that it does not kick off KDiff or VSDiffMerge to resolve any merge conflicts.  

If the plugin could recognize the conflict and kick the files to the configured tool for dealing with them then it would be sliced bread in a bag.  Its so close I can smell it, just wish I knew how to code at this level to assist in fixing it.

Hopefully someone from the community will jump in with the ninja code fix...

Thanks for updating...

[Anup Narang]

You're probably right. I can't get past it when there's a merge conflict.

Any experts care to look into this?