Pull request shows already merged changes

[Satheeskumar]

Hey there, recently we're experiencing a problem that some time new pull requests showing old commits and files changes which are already in the target branch.

And I couldn't find any proper solution from previous discussions. 

1. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Bitbucket-questions/Target-Branch-Shows-Differences-For-Already-Merged-Changes/qaq-p/2008192
2. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Bitbucket-questions/Pull-request-shows-commits-which-are-already-present-in-target/qaq-p/1815854

And for your information, We not sure how it's happening. But most of the time working as expected. sometime not. 

Please let me know if there any solution for this.

Thanks.

[Theodora Boudale]

Hi @Satheeskumar,

We have changed the diff algorithm from what we call a '3-way' diff to a 2-way 'three-dot' diff in order to improve performance on complex diffs:

https://bitbucket.org/blog/improving-performance-on-complex-diffs

The '3-way' diff includes changes to the destination branch, whereas the 'three-dot' diff does not reflect changes made to the destination branch since the source branch was created from the destination branch.

In the case where files changed in the source branch are the same files as those changed in the destination branch, the 'three-dot' diff will show only the changes introduced in the source branch.

There is no way to switch to the '3-way' diff algorithm at the moment, we have a request to provide that on demand: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-21964

If you want to see changes to the destination branch in a PR, you can merge the destination branch into the source branch. The blog post I shared above provides more details in the section "How to see changes to the destination branch in a pull request".

Kind regards,
Theodora

[Satheeskumar]

Thanks.
I'll check this solution when I face the issue next time.

Once again thank you for your considerations.

[Theodora Boudale]

You are very welcome, please feel free to reach out if you have any other questions.