(Post theme: Oops! I Did It Again by Britney Spears)
Posting because I’ve hit this three times now and each time not remembered the solution until I figured it out again, in the hopes that writing it down will prompt my memory next time and avoid a fourth “figure it out fresh” cycle.
At work (in the team I’m on), we develop in the open using public Github repositories. To introduce a change, we fork the repo, create a branch, and submit pull requests to the upstream main branch.
As changes make their way into main, it’s handy to be branching off an up-to-date fork, and GitHub has a convenient “sync fork” tool in the web UI to do this. Most of the time, this works perfectly. Unfortunately, a few times I’ve tried to sync and it silently fails (the cause is user error, but the silent nature of the fail is very poor UX from GitHub, and I feel like they could actually make the whole process work, which would be ideal UX).
The reason it has failed (each time it has happened to me) is that branch protection is enabled for the main branch on the fork. I’ve enabled this to avoid accidentally pushing changes to main (forgetting to create a branch first), which I never want to do – except for pulling in upstream changes.
There might be a simpler way to work around this (other than opening a PR from upstream main to the fork main) but I just disable the protection, sync, then enable it again.
TonyAndrewMeyer 