Comment by conor_f
4 hours ago
This just reeks to me of bad practice. Why use this as opposed to breaking your change into smaller PRs and merging them individually behind a feature flag or similar? With this, you have a marginally better UX for reviewing through the Github website, but the underlying issues are the same. The change being introduced is not sufficiently testable by itself, or it's (somehow) too tightly coupled to other parts of the UI/codebase that it can't be split. You still need to test for integration issues at every point of the stack, and some architecture issues or points of code reuse can't be seen from stacked changes like this.
Not for me, but I'm glad it fits other people's workflows. I just hope it doesn't encourage people to try make poorly reasoned changes!
When I've reached for stacked PRs (in the past, not using this feature) it's precisely because I've split my change into smaller PRs being merged individually.
I've just written those smaller PRs at once, or in quick enough succession that the previous PRs weren't merged before the later ones were ready. And the later ones relied on the previous ones because that's how working on a feature works.
The earlier PRs are absolutely reviewable and testable without relying on the later ones. The later ones are just treating the earlier ones as part of the codebase. I.e. everything here looks like two different PRs except the timing.
An obvious example would be "implement API for a feature" and then "implement UI that uses that API". Two different PRs. The second fundamentally relies on the first.