Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Stacked PRs

github.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 548 posts

Re: GitHub Stacked PRs

#21

Post by landr0id »

noident wrote: post #4

If only there were some way to logically break up large pull requests into smaller pieces... Some way of creating a checkpoint with a diff including your changes, and some kind of message explaining the context behind the change... some way to "commit" a change to the record of the repository...

Part of the idea behind stacked PRs is to keep your commits focused and with isolated changes that are meaningful.

A stacked PR allows you to construct a sequence of PRs in a way that allows you to iterate on and merge the isolated commits, but blocks merging items higher in the stack until the foundational changes are merged.

Re: GitHub Stacked PRs

#22

Post by ameliaquining »

ezekg wrote: post #9
bsimpson wrote: post #5

Finally! I never understood the PR=branch model GitHub defaulted to. Stacked commits (ala Phabricator/Gerrit) always jived more with how my brain reasons about changes. Glad to see this option. I guess I'll have to install their CLI thing now.

My only complaint off the bat is the reliance on the GH CLI, which I don't use either. But maybe by the time it's GA they'll have added UI support.

You can in fact do this from the web UI: https://github.github.com/gh-stack/guides/ui/#creating-a-sta...

Re: GitHub Stacked PRs

#23

Post by chao- »

Even though moments where I would reach for it are rare, this is a very welcome feature. In times when I could have used it, it was not difficult to emulate via more branches, consistent naming, referencing the PRs, etc. Not difficult, but definitely tedious, and always left me feeling less organized than I like to feel.

Re: GitHub Stacked PRs

#25

Post by adamwk »

As someone who used phabricator and mercurial, using GitHub and git again feels like going back to the stone ages. Hopefully this and jujutsu can recreate stacked-diff flow of phabricator.

It’s not just nice for monorepos. It makes both reviewing and working on long-running feature projects so much nicer. It encourages smaller PRs or diffs so that reviews are quick and easy to do in between builds (whereas long pull requests take a big chunk of time).

Re: GitHub Stacked PRs

#26

Post by ZeWaka »

whalesalad wrote: post #12

At first I thought this was a user submitted project due to the subdomain of github.com but then realize the subdomain is also github. Is this an official channel for this sort of thing? Surprised this isn't on the official blog.

It's their 'GitHub' org GitHub Pages domain - it's just .com instead of .io (not to be confused with their gh.io link shortener)

Re: GitHub Stacked PRs

#28

Post by siva7 »

What a time to be alive. Stacked PRs are now a native feature of Github, even with first-class support for your ai agents. Vibeslop your whole Jira Backlog. Don't fear the merge anymore. Just make any feature branch a long-lived branch by stacking one upon another like bricks.

I'm old enough to have worked with SVN and young enough to have taught engineers to avoid stacking PR in Git. All wisdom has been lost and will probably be rediscovered in another time by another generation.

Re: GitHub Stacked PRs

#29

Post by ezekg »

ameliaquining wrote: post #22
ezekg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only complaint off the bat is the reliance on the GH CLI, which I don't use either. But maybe by the time it's GA they'll have added UI support.

You can in fact do this from the web UI: https://github.github.com/gh-stack/guides/ui/#creating-a-sta...

I must have missed that. Amazing! From a reviewer's POV, this will be so nice to at the very least remove diff noise for PRs built on top of another PR. I usually refrain from reviewing child PRs until the parent is merged and the child can be rebased, for the sole reason that the diffs are hard to review i.r.t. what came from where.

Re: GitHub Stacked PRs

#30

Post by cleverdash »

As a solo dev I rarely need stacked PRs, but the underlying problem, keeping PRs small and reviewable, is real even when you're your own reviewer. I've found that forcing myself to break work into small branches before I start (rather than retroactively splitting a giant branch) is the actual discipline. The tooling just makes it less painful when you don't.

Curious whether this changes anything for the AI-assisted workflow. Right now I let Claude Code work on a feature branch and it naturally produces one big diff. Stacked PRs could be interesting if agents learned to split their own work into logical chunks.

Post reply on HN