I thrive on stacked PRs but this sure seems like a weird way to implement support for it. Just have each branch point to their parent in the chain, the end. Just native Git. I've been longing for better GitHub support for this but the CLI is not where I need that support: just the UI.
Rebasing after merging a base branch becomes a pain though, when you do this. IMO the CLI will be nice to automate the process of rebasing each branch on its parent.
Agreed. I do have tooling for a rebase + push flow, but it simply calls native git commands.
The CLI is completely optional, you can create stacked PRs purely via the UI.
Also the rationale for having a chain of branches pointing to each other was so the diff in a PR shows just the relevant changes from the specific branch, not the entire set of changes going back to the parent/trunk.
Curious how you're thinking about it?
> so the diff in a PR shows just the relevant changes from the specific branch
That's exactly right.
> you can create stacked PRs purely via the UI
How?
I see from the docs https://github.github.com/gh-stack/introduction/overview:
> When a pull request is part of a stack
How does GitHub determine if a PR is part of a stack? Is it automatically detected so that I don't need to adjust my tooling that already creates chained PRs?
+1 this isn’t something new, it’s been possible all along in native git if you’re willing to do branch management and rebasing yourself. Just without the fancy UI / stack map.
Yes! Maybe that feature will come next.