We have a protected 'patch' branch that is updated from pull requests. We also have protected 'customer' branches (created from the 'patch' branch) that we wish to update with the 'patch' branch on occasion. You cannot push to these branches directly, you have to create a pull request to the branches.
Our original approach when there was a conflict was to create a 'conflict resolution' branch off of the 'customer' branch, merge the 'patch' branch into the 'conflict resolution' branch, and then PR that branch into the 'customer' branch.
We've quickly realized that we also need to PR the 'patch' branch into the 'customer' branch afterward to put them at the same ancestor (not sure if I'm saying that correctly.. basically catch the 'customer' branch up to the 'patch' branch). There are occasions where this does not work. If a patch was manually applied (and modified somewhat) to a 'customer' branch beforehand, the PR from 'patch' to 'customer' will fail and even after PRing a 'conflict' branch into 'customer', the PR from 'patch' to 'customer' still will see conflicts.
If I were able to push to this branch, simply merging with -Xours would work just fine as I'm already confident that I've resolved any conflicts and I just want 'patch' and 'customer' to see no changes. But, there isn't any option, that I can find in DevOps, to specify -Xours for pull requests.
Is there something simple I'm missing in order to do this through Azure DevOps? Thanks!!