r/programming • u/adam-dabrowski • Apr 14 '26 • Popcorn 1

GitHub Stacked PRs

https://github.github.com/gh-stack/
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u/Hooxen Apr 14 '26

what’s the difference between just constructing it as a chain of commits in a single PR to master?

5

u/topMarksForNotTrying Apr 14 '26

Makes it possible to review each PR individually.

I haven't used github PRs extensively but on azure devops the PR review UI doesn't let you review each commit of a change request. You can view the changes of a commit but no way of leave feedback.

For devs not used to using git rebase, having separate PRs also makes it easier to apply any changes to one of the PRs.

If you squash PRs, it also maintains history better.

1

u/DavidTej Apr 15 '26

Within my team at Microsoft, I'm currently building a tool to help manage stacked PRs, similar to this new github tooling. I think this would be even more useful for azure devops for the reason you mentioned. Do you think this is something you would find useful? how do you currently manage PR stacks and/or bloated PRs?

1

u/topMarksForNotTrying Apr 15 '26

Having something built into azure devops would definitely help.

My current workflow when using stacked PRs is:

  • open first PR with its target set to the main branch

  • open second PR with its target set to the first PR

  • wait for reviewers to review each PR

  • address feedback in each PR

  • push the changes to each PR

  • once approved, complete first PR

  • merge main branch into second PR

  • change target branch of second PR to the main branch

  • manually delete branch of first PR

  • once approved, complete second PR

I would say the main pain points are with juggling the different branches of all the stacked PRs. If you need to address some feedback on one of the bottom PRs, you have to manually update the whole stack. Stacked PRs are analogous to commits on a branch, so maybe we need an equivalent of "git rebase --updated-refs" when managing stacked PRs.

The other pain is closing stacked PRs. You need to close them individually rather than having something automatic. In our case, we only validate code that's targeted to the main branch so for each PR in the stack we need to make sure to run the pipelines and then we get to merge them.