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Stacked pull requests are now in public preview - GitHub Changelog (github.blog)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 3 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Maybe I'm being dumb but I don't see the point? Just be disciplined in creating smaller PRs?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    That is the point. By making smaller PRs, you inevitably end up with dependencies between them. So you'd like to stack them.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (2 children)

    Maybe I just don't know enough how these work, as I've never heard of stacked prs before.

    What does the workflow look like? Can the first PR be merged and deployed without the other prs being approved and merged first? Or do they all need to be approved and it all gets merged together?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    We’re keen to use stacked PRs at work.

    We’re using agentic coding heavily, but still reviewing code to help us steer the software architecture and keep our understanding of the implementation. We generate large changes quickly, but need to break them into smaller, logically ordered PRs for review.

    It’s nice for the reviewer to be able to look ahead through the full change, so they see can check the big picture, rather than merging a couple of PRs and then spotting that the abstractions are wrong.

    PR stacks work very well for providing this kind of visibility, but are annoying to merge. After one PR in the stack is merged, the next PR needs to be rebased onto and targeted to the updated main branch. With our branch protection rules, this triggers another CI run and dismisses the PR approval, requiring human intervention.

    It would be much nicer to have the reviewer go through all the PRs and then merge the stack in one go.

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