[arxanas]

Which Git client do you use, and also, how do you remember all the remote branch names?

> And even the "long version" is pretty negligible (like, maybe 10 seconds per branch?)

I notice that mainly the differences in opinion with regards to workflow is disagreement about "how long is too long" for various operations :)

[morelisp]

Magit, and the remote branch names are visible in the log view and easy to enter via tab completion. (We're still talking about stacked PRs right? Median stacked at any given time is probably 2 and p90 is maybe 4? Max I've ever seen is ~10 and that was quite a fucked up situation for plenty of other reasons.)

10 seconds would certainly be too long for me. It is obviously not too long for them, or they'd learn some keyboard shortcuts to get the easy 5 out of the way to begin with. But regardless, it's all pretty much dwarfed by things that need actual brainpower like re-reading my commit messages for grammatical errors / broken links / etc.

[arxanas]

I see, thanks for the information. I often stack 10+ commits, so I don't think your workflow would be reasonable for me. (For example, here, I have 11 finished commits and 3 in progress: https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/pull/451 — but I don't actually use stacked PRs on Github, particularly if no one is reviewing my code. Most of my stacking is at work with Phabricator anyways, which handles this better.)

[morelisp]

It’s only necessary to push ten branches, one per commit, if you intend ten separate, let’s say, “review events” though. For that example we would have fewer than that nor would we want that many. I do stack 10+ commits fairly regularly but that may be only 1-2 reviews.

(I’m not familiar with Phabricator, only Gerrit and GH/GL, as well as some more manual Workflows.)

[arxanas]

Right, in this case, I would prefer 10 separate review events. Other than for code review purposes themselves, I would want CI to run on each of these commits individually, rather than only on the result at the end.

[dcow]

You can click on individual commits in a pull request on GH (and in every single git tool I know) to review each commit individually. A pull request is an abstraction over a set of commits. Sometimes it's 1:1, many times it's not. Some large companies force the issue because even though it is more rigamarole for everyone involved, they can afford it. So then people invent silly scripts and coin entire workflows just so they can "push 10 PRs all at once" because they want the efficiency back that a 1:1 commit to PR policy robbed from them. It's all quite silly. FYI many CI systems support running each commit individually, including GH and GitLab.

[arxanas]

I (and many developers I know) would use the GitHub individual commit review system, but it has a lot of missing features which make it unreasonable to update commits in the PR. For example, if you rewrite one of the commits in a multi-commit PR, then GitHub loses the association and old comments are lost. Similarly, you can't view the diff between an old and new version of a commit.

As far as I know, Phabricator does not let you view or comment on individual commits in a code review (which I use at work). Let me know if you know differently and I might switch to doing that.

Can you advise me on running CI on each commit in the PR in GitHub? As far as I can see, it's technically possible in that you can run arbitrary code as part of your CI, but there's no convenient way to do it. (In particular, I would want to be able to view the CI runs for each individual commit, i.e. render the little checkmark/x next to each commit in GitHub, which seems like it would require a lot of integration via the API.)

One thing that often happens in a stack is the earlier commits are regularly merged into the main branch while the later commits await review. This helps to keep things in sync in a trunk-based development workflow. Is there a way to split out and merge only the earliest (reviewed and accepted) commits, and leave the later commits pending review, in a tool like GitHub?

Overall, I would like to be able to use GitHub PRs for big stacks, but there seems to be a lot of friction in doing so, to the point where it's more convenient to adopt an alternate code review tool (like Graphite) or PR management tool.

[djur]

Please take a moment to remind yourself that different people are in different situations and have different social and technical constraints influencing their decisionmaking, and that people can come to different conclusions from your own for reasons other than incompetence and ignorance. I am sure you are a very smart and effective person, but that doesn't mean that you know what is best for every person in every situation.