Comment by steveklabnik
19 hours ago
Stacked PRs tend to encourage a series of well-organized commits, because you review each commit separately, rather than together.
What they do that the single branch cannot is things like "have a disjoint set of reviewers where some people only review some commits", and that property is exactly why it encourages more well-organized commits, because you are reviewing them individually, rather than as a massive whole.
They also encourage amending existing commits rather than throwing fixup commits onto the end of a branch, which makes the original commit better rather than splitting it into multiple that aren't semantically useful on their own.
I think the point the GP was trying to make is that the GitHub UI ought to be able to allow you to submit a branch with multiple well-organized commits and review each commit separately with its own PR. The curation of the commits that you'd do for stacked PRs could just as easily be done with commits on a single branch; some of us don't just toss random WIP and fixup commits on a branch and leave it to GitHub to squash at the end. I.e., it's the GitHub UI rather than Git that has been lacking.
(FWIW, I'm dealing with this sort of thing at work right now - working on a complex branch, rewriting history to keep it as a sequence of clean testable and reviewable commits, with a plan to split them out to individual PRs when I finish.)
> I think the point the GP was trying to make is that the GitHub UI ought to be able to allow you to submit a branch with multiple well-organized commits and review each commit separately with its own PR
So the point he's trying to make is that Gituhub UI should support Stacked PRs but call them something else because he doesn't like the name?
> I think the point the GP was trying to make is that the GitHub UI ought to be able to allow you to submit a branch with multiple well-organized commits and review each commit separately with its own PR.
That's what this feature is, conceptually. In practice, it does seem slightly more cumbersome due to the fact that they're building it on top of the existing, branch-based PR system, but if you want to keep it to one commit, you can (and that's how I've been working with PRs for a while now regardless, honestly).
They confirmed in other comments here that you don't have to use the CLI, just like you don't have to use gh in general to make pull requests, it's just that they think the experience is nicer with it. This is largely a forge-side UI change.