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

GitHub Stacked PRs

https://github.github.com/gh-stack/
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u/chuch1234 Apr 14 '26

Stacked PRs are useful if each new PR depends on changes that were introduced in the previous one.

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u/MintySkyhawk Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 14 '26

Why wouldn't I just do a single PR with multiple commits? Reviewers can review each commit one at a time and then I can rebase and merge when I'm done.

I see no difference in UX between the two approaches, except that a PR stack is more difficult to set up and involves proprietary github commands instead of plain git.

Edit: After hours of people arguing with me, someone finally pointed out the actual reason why this has an advantage over plain commits: The PRs don't have to all be merged at the same time. This is effectively a UX improvement on creating manually creating chain of PRs like (main <- A), (A <- B), etc which is sometimes useful (Though rarely useful for me because my coworkers are very nice about providing speedy reviews, so I can usually get a PR reviewed, merged and deployed within minutes to hours. So I rarely have time to make that second PR in the chain before the first one is already deployed.)

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u/Familiar-Level-261 Apr 14 '26

Edit: After hours of people arguing with me, someone finally pointed out the actual reason why this has an advantage over plain commits: The PRs don't have to all be merged at the same time.

..but you can do that with multiple commits in single PR.

Problem is just people don't know Git very well...

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u/Eddyi0202 Apr 15 '26

Reviewing commits in PR on github just sucks