"Sync fork" -> "Update branch" does nothing

[BryanKadzban]

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I've forked a whole bunch of upstream repositories over the years. When pulling in changes from those upstream repositories -- for example before starting to work on a change in my local repo, which will eventually be sent as a pull request to upstream -- I have always successfully able to use the "sync repo" options.

At some point in the last 3 months, that broke. (That is, last time I successfully used it was about three months ago.) Now, I can push the "update branch" button all day long, and nothing happens to the repository. The button text changes to "Updating" for a second or two, but then it goes back to what it was, and the local repo's HEAD hash is still the same. I also just tried generating a local pull request with the repo differences, which strangely put the description of the local repo as "2 commits behind, 2 commits ahead" of the upstream repo ... and the "discard local changes" button, which also shows up when you're ahead of upstream, also does nothing.

I don't understand why the operation is failing. Is there an error happening that's getting ignored? I've tried logging out and back in, in case it was something like a half-logged-in state somewhere, that's causing a permission error that's being ignored. No change.

...On second thought, I can run a browser request trace, from the developer console. This finds a POST to /BryanKadzban/heapless/branches/fetch_and_merge/master (for the "heapless" repository), which gets an HTTP/2 422 response ("unprocessable content"). The request is generated by XMLHttpRequest (at least according to the headers), so something in the JS seems to be sending something that the server handler doesn't like. I don't see anything obviously broken in the headers (or the body, but the Content-Length is zero so there is no body).

It's possible the cause of the different behavior here is a browser upgrade; I've done several of those over the last few months. But the github site ought to work with any recent relatively-common browser. (This is Firefox 121; I have an upgrade to 122 pending but not activated yet.)

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[benoitpascal]

It's been a while but after facing the same issue, I found out it was related to another configuration for me.

I have a rule "Require a pull request before merging" rule enabled on main branches so I can't update on main branch using this "Update" button. When I try, nothing happen, no alert, no error, like you described.

I assume there are other configuration that can have same consequences, this is only one of them.