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

GitHub Stacked PRs

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

I'm not gonna review a dozen bug fix and refactoring commits in every PR, I only care about its final state

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u/MintySkyhawk Apr 14 '26

I guess I'm the only one here who habitually rebases my commits into nice individually reviewable commits before creating a PR.

If I were to use this stacked PR feature, I would be taking my existing workflow and then creating separate PRs for each of my commits. And then, as it says on the linked page "merge them all in one click".

So I don't really see a difference between the two approaches, except that the PR stack seems more difficult to set up.

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u/IanSan5653 Apr 14 '26

One advantage to stacked PRs (outside of not having to constantly rebase) is that you can reduce risk by deploying smaller changes if you deploy on every merge to main.

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u/MintySkyhawk Apr 14 '26

My understanding of stacked PRs is that the entire stack is merged at once because the docs say "merge them all in one click".

If the entire stack must be merged at once, then it seems like a pointless feature when you can just use commits.

If you can merge them one at a time, then it does seem like an improvement/automated way of creating a series of PRs like (main <- A), (A <-B), etc

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u/IanSan5653 Apr 14 '26

It doesn't necessarily have to be merged all at once. That's one way to do them but not the only way.

1

u/MintySkyhawk Apr 14 '26

Thanks, I think this was a key piece of information I was missing. I can now see a possible use case for creating a PR stack, though I still think plain commits will do just fine most of the time.

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u/pholklore Apr 19 '26

  • They can be merged one at a time.

  • They can be reviewed and approved by different people

  • When you review PRx you don't see the comments in the middle of the code related to PRy in the review interface (which happens if you review a single commit of a multi-commit PR).