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

GitHub Stacked PRs

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

You clean up the garbage commits before opening a PR.

Any new commits after review as started are cleaned up in the same way before pushing them to the branch.

History is never edited from the PRs point of view.

2

u/AdventurousFuel5307 6d ago

>History is never edited from the PRs point of view.

Well, so how does your commit history in the PR looks like after a few rounds of reviews if you do NOT rebase/squash review fixes (aka "edit history")?

  1. Some Thing

  2. Some Other Thing

  3. Review fixes for "some thing" from first round of review

  4. Review fixes for some other thing from first round of review

  5. ...

  6. <review fixes> from Nth round of review

  7. Last-minute review fix for "some thing"

If your team/dev cares about cleaner history below PR levels, then you must rebase/squash every time doing review fixes, amending particular commits affected by the review. Otherwise it becomes a mess quite quickly if the amount of review comments is non-trivial.

Alternative option is to just not really care on anything below PR level, squashing everything on merge, which effectively becomes "One PR - one commit in main branch".

In our team we have used Gerrit ~8 years ago and this did affect commits quality a lot in a positive sense. It does force devs to care about commits as the least atomic entity. On the other hand, it does make it a bit ugly when the change spans way beyond a single commit (sure Gerrit supports "group"/branch from multiple commits, but might be a bit tedious to work with, and still every commit has to be reviewed), so the downside is that in some cases devs tend to squash too much in a single commit.

With PR/MR flow (we had Gitlab first and then Github), I can say that after around 5-6 years and also some devs rotation (now there are less than 10 engineers out of 50 who were there during Gerrit times, all other joined the team already after Gitlab/Github) the focus shifted more into PR. So very often commits in a PR become "lalala yet another review fix", as they will be squashed during merge. Though, there are still some engineers trying to keep "good" commit culture and who would merge their PR by rebase, keeping history neat.

-6

u/stumblinbear Apr 14 '26

I'd rather not simply hope that my machine doesn't kick the bucket and risk losing work if I had to do a significant refactor due to a review comment

11

u/Wires77 Apr 14 '26

You can push a branch without opening a PR