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swiftcoderyesterday at 9:15 AM4 repliesview on HN

stacked PRs. stacked PRs!

Seriously wish the stacked PR workflow would gain more traction outside of FAANG. Apart from the (somewhat pricey) Graphite offering, there's no standard UI for managing stacked PRs in the wild.


Replies

reywilliamsyesterday at 9:52 AM

GitHub[1] is working through this now, hopefully it leads to more adoption.

[1]: https://x.com/jaredpalmer/status/2019817235163074881?s=20

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ahartmetzyesterday at 10:16 AM

I think Gerrit has something like stacked PRs - and incidentally it's used for Chromium and was created for running its own public open source projects by Google. It's also used by the Qt project, which is where I sometimes use it.

Gerrit looks ugly and is not very easy to use at first, but at least it's not slow like GitLab and GitHub.

amabitoyesterday at 11:57 AM

The tooling gap exists partly because git's data model has no native concept of "this branch's upstream is another feature branch" — each PR is independent from the forge's perspective, so rebasing one layer in the stack requires manually re-targeting every PR below it. FAANG-internal tools solve this by storing the stack relationship in a metadata layer outside git itself, then regenerating the PR graph after each rebase. Without that layer, the bookkeeping falls on the developer, which is why most teams abandon the workflow after two or three levels deep regardless of how disciplined they are.

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Hamukoyesterday at 10:23 AM

What's the benefit of stacked PRs?

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