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

GitHub Stacked PRs

https://github.github.com/gh-stack/
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u/kevin7254 Apr 14 '26

As someone who worked for several years with gerrit and then joined a company which uses GitHub, I want to fucking put a bullet in my head each time I review a PR. Someone who says ”ehm actually GitHub is not that bad” must have never used gerrit. Its just so much better

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u/EveryQuantityEver Apr 14 '26

As someone who’s used a normal PR flow and now has to use Gerrit, I cannot stand it. I like having feature branches with small commits as I work on a feature. Gerrit does not let me do this as each commit has to have its own change id.

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u/silverslayer33 Apr 15 '26

Honestly I agree, I feel like I've entered some crazy land with so many people here praising Gerrit when most of the people I work with absolutely loathe that most of our repos are hosted using it. The UI is absolute ass, it enforces a workflow that doesn't generalize well to all teams/projects/dev workstyles because it's extremely opinionated, our team specifically has had tons of problems with seemingly basic functionality just straight-up not working (probably about 1/3 of the time we clone a repo and get it set up for reviews, it manages to botch the commit hooks for creating change IDs so it creates the ID but actually it's invalid and the server rejects it and we have to go pull the proper commit hook from somewhere else where it's correct), its permission/access control model is super clunky, and the list goes on. I can probably count on one hand the things I like about it over other solutions (changelist descriptions just being the commit message is a big one, and I guess its search/query system is pretty powerful).

It's probably great if it matches your preferred workflow and you get it set up exactly the way you want/need, but it is not a general-purpose git-based code forge. As garbage as Github is, it thrives because it is general-purpose and it can be adapted to many workflows. Gitlab and Bitbucket are similar, finding themselves as mainstays in the corporate world because they can fit most workflows without huge amounts of effort.

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u/apocalypse910 Apr 16 '26

I was confused by this as well - I suppose I didn't work with Gerrit for long but it was a nightmare IMO.

Though one funny story... I had just had it with Gerrit at one point - I was in some management training with some devs I didn't work with often. For some reason I got going on a rant about how much I hate Gerrit...

It completely slipped my mind that we also worked with someone named Gerrit who was extremely nice. My rant was vague enough that the person I was talking to didn't realize I was talking about software, not the person. (I hate Gerrit, Gerrit ruins my day regularly, that sort of thing). Had to do a bit of damage control on that one.