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The Atlassian Change Blog provides details about new and pending changes being rolled out to customers of their products.

The BitBucket Cloud section of this week's blog (Jan 16 to Jan 23, 2023) linked above contains this cryptic new entry:

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Text version:

Pull requests are now immutable
ROLLING OUT / NEW THIS WEEK
Bitbucket Cloud pull requests are now immutable. Note: You might come across pull requests that were merged before this change was implemented, so you may see some changes that are not relevant anymore.

Can anyone explain what this entry means and what functionality was actually changed?

I've played around with several test pull requests, but so far have not noticed any difference in capabilities or features.

I've searched the BitBucket documentation, forums, BCLOUD JIRA, and Google but turned up no source with further details (presumably because the change is so new).

Dan Bonachea
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  • From my understanding this means that if you create a pull request from branch a to branch b with some X files , if you then push any changes to branch a these won't be reflected in the pull request(in other words won't be merged into branch b) – Manos Kounelakis Jan 23 '23 at 06:49
  • How does the maintainer make changes to the pr before merging now ? – Lk77 Jan 23 '23 at 06:52
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    @ManosKounelakis That was also my first thought, but in my own testing (using a newly created PR) I'm still able to push commits to a source branch after creating the PR, and the PR still updates as it always has. – Dan Bonachea Jan 23 '23 at 06:55
  • Interesting. I don't use bit bucked so I don't have more know how . But definitely update us if you find an answer – Manos Kounelakis Jan 23 '23 at 07:08

1 Answers1

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As far as I know there's been no official clarification from Atlassian so far, this answer contains educated guesses based on community discussion.

After further experimentation, I now believe the change blog intended to say:

Bitbucket Cloud pull requests are now immutable after merge.

In particular it appears that certain properties of pull requests (PRs) can no longer be changed after merge. This includes at least:

  • PR title
  • PR description
  • PR reviewer list and approvals
  • PR task list, task descriptions and task completion status
  • PR code diff (ignores subsequent changes to the source branch)

These properties are now fixed at merge time and cannot be changed after merge (at least using the Bitbucket Cloud web UI). At least some of these appear to represent a recent behavioral change roughly corresponding to the Jan 2023 time window in question.

As of 2023-01-23, comments on merged PRs can still be added, edited and deleted after merge. Deleting a comment with an attached task (in either state) also deletes the task, but this may have been unintentional.

Dan Bonachea
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    This is consistent with my recent failed attempt to approve a PR which had been merged while I was on vacation. I am certain I've done a post-merge Approve in the past, but it simply wasn't an option when I tried last week. – Paul H. Hargrove Jan 24 '23 at 03:57