Comment by skydhash
3 hours ago
IMO, in a team settings, improving the review policies and speed has a much better benefit. A PR is supposed to be a proposal for some change, adding more proposals on top of something that is not reviewed is a bit icky.
> . By focusing the stack to the different reviewers you can avoid ambiguity about "what a person is signing off on" in the stack.
That can be easily done with comments. If the PR are orthogonal, they could have been split. And if they're not, I would really like to know how the part that I'm reviewing interacts with the rest of the changes.
> That can be easily done with comments. If the PR are orthogonal, they could have been split.
Comments are ad-hoc and don't scale, relying on the author to interpret and adhere to the extent of the reviewers approval.
> And if they're not, I would really like to know how the part that I'm reviewing interacts with the rest of the changes.
you are free to look up, down, and around the stack; nobody is hiding the code from you. But in many cases this is just unnecessary.
The PRs may be orthogonal but still be dependent. Feature X depends on improvement Y which also needs bugfix Z. You might go and implement X in a branch, tweaking the codebase as you go, but split the branch apart for review. You put X/Y/Z up, but X contains Y and Z, which means you can't request reviews for X without Y and Z merging, or else have a bunch of extra code that gets in the way.
Let's say that Z has an error (some assumption that does not hold), and needed to be reverted. How does that impact X's viability? I wouldn't trust any reviews of X after that.
I strongly believe that PR should be compared to the main branch, and not rely on unmerged code. Unless you merge everything together in one go. And in the latter case, everything should be reviewed together.
I think the answer is - it depends! This is why we make good money. I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule here to apply.