Handling merge commits requiring issue keys

[Herb Warren]

I've tried turning on "Require issue keys in commit messages" for some of our repositories - we've always had a general agreement to use issue keys, and I thought enforcing them was a good idea. It's great except for one thing: branch merges. I'm using Mercurial, and we use feature branching, so there's a fair bit of branch / merge effort.

Traditionally, we've merged back to a build branch with a commit message of "Merge", because we may have many stories that need to be completed before the merge takes place.

Is there any way to allow a Merge commit w/o issue keys? I've noticed that you can merge branches in the bitbucket website w/o the key, so there's clearly some way of pulling it off, but I don't want to require using the website to do all our merges, either.

[Martin Gregory]

Did you ever find a solution for this?

[Herb Warren]

Nope, and it's kinda frustrating.

[Martin Gregory]

I went on to try this built in feature and it seems to work for our repos.

That is to say a commit without keys is rejected, but merge commits are allowed.

Yay for our use case ... I wonder if this points to something that might work at your end if sorted out?