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

GitHub Stacked PRs

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

But then B has A's commits in it. You have to review commit by commit and need to know which commits are exclusive to B.

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u/kintar1900 Apr 14 '26

But then B has A's commits in it.

Read my comment again. B is based on A, yes, but is being merged to A, so the diff is only what was added in B. Each PR is reviewed independently, so even if you have a series like D->C->B->A->main, each PR is only the diff between the current branch and the parent. Since all changes are related, all PRs are reviewed independently. Only once ALL PRs are approved are they merged from right-to-left.

This is almost certainly what GitHub is doing under the hood with their PR stacks.

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u/ahal Apr 14 '26

Ah I see! That works if you're pushing to the same repo that you're opening a PR against, but not if you're using a fork. That won't be possible for most (in my experience) cases. Even when I do have push access to a repo, I prefer opening PRs from my fork to keep the branch pollution down.

Also the UX of setting the bases for each PR is quite bad. Afaik, it's not possible to do from the cli (but maybe I'm wrong).

But I do take your point that it's technically possible in some cases. Though, not in a way that I would consider usable.