(This maybe should go into one of the related boards. StackSomethingelse?)
At work, we routinely merge our feature branch into develop, and then the develop branch into qa. Initially, develop and qa are the same. We create a brand new feature branch (local and remote) from develop. Make our changes, and push the feature branch up to gitlab.
I make a merge request to merge feature to develop. A colleague approves it, and I merge. No problems.
Then I make a merge request to merge develop to qa. Gitlab refuses to merge it. Says I have conflicts. (Remember, when I started out, develop and qa were the same.)
To solve this problem, I go back to my local environment, make a branch called resync off of develop, merge origin/qa to this branch, and then push it up to gitlab. I submit another merge request, this time to merge resync to develop, some colleague approves it, I merge it. And then when I go back to my develop-->qa merge request and refresh the page, gitlab says there are no conflicts, and I can go ahead and merge.
If you look at the resync-->develop merge request, there are no changes in the files. I guess it just wants me to include the commits.
Does somebody understand what is going on? Has this happened to you? It's becoming tiring, and also it frightens me that I don't understand what's going on. Help?