[Bug] Fix the broken process to merge PRs

[felixpou]

[felixpou]

@peterbrightwell this was assigned to you, any update?

[peterbrightwell]

Confirmed that unticking "restrict updates" on main would fix, but clearly that's not what we want!

But there is some good news.... GitHub recently (last October) added an "Exempt" setting in the bypass rules option. I just tried that and it fixes the problem without having to disable rules ... but is it perhaps too heavy-handed @vt-tv @felixpou? Details here. Perhaps we could have a very targetted rule with an exemption that just fixes enough?

Meanwhile we should get #266 re-approved following updates to main so that we can test. I've asked @KimonHoffmann and @lapointejp who previously approved.

[peterbrightwell]

I asked Copilot about this, and it seemed quite keen on the Exempt approach:

Exempt = “Team is allowed to merge normally.”
Bypass = “Team must click a big red button to break the rules.”
Your maintainers shouldn’t use bypass — that is heavy‑handed.
Exempt is the only current mechanism that restores GitHub’s previous merge workflow.

Unfortunately GitHub doesn’t offer another option yet. Rulesets replaced classic “allowed actors” with just:

Bypass (explicit, audited override)
Exempt (silent, trusted allow list — intended for maintainers/automation)

Another possibility would to be to set up a Merge Queue that maintainers can send PRs to, and disallow direct merges, but that adds complication.

[vt-tv]

exempt is definitely worth a shot

[felixpou]

TSC
-We will have to try to see if this works well.

[felixpou]

TSC
-looks fine, we close it.