Gitflow and automatic merges from releases to develop branch?

[Scott Merritt]

We're using the gitflow branching model. Is there a way to tell stash to auto-merge release/ branches into my develop branch?

I've turned on the branching model settings and sent my development branch and release/ prefix to match. When pull requests come in and I approve them, it will automatically merge to the release/ branch, but it doesn't cascade down to develop. Is there a way I can do this?

I turned on "Enable automatic merging" in the hopes that it'd do the trick, but it doesn't seem to have done anything. I was thinking it'd be nice to keep our develop branch merged so that there are no nasty conflicts to merge at the end. I know that using the gitflow branching model, you're not expected to leave the release branch open for a long time and it should just be for the last minute fixes, but we work on more than one release at a time. Should we abnadon the 'develop' branch and instead start naming with version numbers so that the cascading, automatic merges work? Or did we just not set this up right?

[jhinch (Atlassian)]

In order for the cascading merges to work you'll need to change the 'default branch' of the repository to 'develop' in the general settings for the repository. A preview of the cascading merge should appear as part of the merge dialog for the pull request so you can verify this works before merging your pull request.