In Bitbucket, if utilizing auto forwarding, the system will create a PR if the change does not autoforward cleanly all the way through downstream branches.

Unfortunately, the user will only discover that conflict if they go into their watch list and see the new PR (tracking the merge failure). Ideally, it will warn/notify the user during the time of merge. If the user does not return to the watch list after merging a PR, they may not know there was a merge failure.

Email notifications do help mitigate that scenario, but real time updates while merging seems like the best time to bring that to the user’s attention. Similar to the warning that is presented if a PR does not merge cleanly with a target Bbranch.

If there are better strategies for surfacing this information, I’m interested in alternative solutions.