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The old workflow opened a pull request and left the merge to a human. The first one was merged with "squash", which copied main's content into develop as one ordinary commit and dropped its history. Git then had no way to know develop already held those changes, so every later back-merge tried to re-apply 236 commits whose content was already there: 67 conflicting files on a merge that should have been a formality. A back-merge carries no decision, so it no longer waits for one. The workflow fast-forwards develop when develop has nothing of its own, and otherwise makes the merge commit itself and pushes it. A pull request is still opened, but only when the work genuinely cannot be done unattended -- a real conflict, or a branch rule refusing the push -- and its body now says in capitals not to squash it. develop itself was repaired separately: main merged in with its content taken throughout, verified byte-identical to main's tree, which lost nothing because develop carried no work of its own.
lorem-dev
enabled auto-merge
September 8, 2026 15:49
The previous commit tried to have the workflow push the merge to develop. That cannot work: `develop` is protected and refuses pushes outright -- "Changes must be made through a pull request". The attempt is on record in the run it declined. So the pull request stays; the person goes. The workflow now turns on auto-merge with the MERGE method, and GitHub merges the PR once its required checks pass. Nobody picks a method, so the squash that broke this once cannot happen by accident. Where auto-merge is unavailable the run warns and the PR body says, in capitals, not to squash it. This needed `allow_auto_merge` on the repository, which was off. Permissions drop to `contents: read`, since nothing pushes any more.
A dependency bump is ordinary work, and ordinary work enters through `develop` per Branching in CONTRIBUTING.md. Opening them against `main` put them straight onto the release branch. Both ecosystems move, npm and github-actions. The one already open against `main` stays there; Dependabot does not retarget an existing pull request.
lorem-dev
disabled auto-merge
September 8, 2026 16:00
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Automated back-merge of
mainintodevelop, opened because it could not be done unattended -- either the two branches conflict, or a branch rule refused the push.Latest commit on main:
580da1b- ci: back-merge without waiting for a person to merge a PRTriggered by push to
mainin workflowBack-merge main -> developrun34246969724.Merge this with a MERGE COMMIT, not a squash. A squash copies main's content without its history, so git stops knowing that develop already contains it and every later back-merge conflicts on files nobody touched. That is what happened once already; see the comment at the top of
.github/workflows/backmerge.yml.