[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.

[dcow]

> 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.

Isn't there a "commits" tab when viewing a revision? Also Phabricator is no longer maintained for the last year.

> 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.)

You'd use the https://docs.github.com/en/rest/commits/statuses API to publish the little checkmark. More info: https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-....

However, before you do that, consider: this one I think is a slight impedance mismatch between how users conceptually think about using GH and how GH actions are designed to be triggered. The most simple thing to do if you want every commit checked and tested is just make a GH action that runs your checks on push, which gets run on every commit and updates the status. If you already have a push action, just remove the "main" branch restriction. The PR action is designed to do PR-scoped things. You can, if you really only want to check commits once they are opened for PR, iterate over the commit list and manually trigger workflows to test and check each one (you can even just manually trigger your existing push action if you add the manual trigger option and specify the commit sha yourself and it will run, I think). But, is the list of commits that get pushed to the repo and the list of commits you want to eventually test for inclusion into main really that different, at the end of the day?

[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.

[dcow]

That is, in fact, my whole point. There are multiple ways to use your tools--don't assume that people who prefer to use things a different way are ignorant. We completely agree. My challenge is to the frequency at which there is actual need to limit the allowed workflows as a result of different preferences. In other words, let there be a diversity of workflows and deal with it.

More often than not I've seen such limits used to "reign in" "misbehaving" engineers or because, as I've suggested, people sometimes don't know how to use a tool to its full capacity. Sometimes it's purely people wanting to force their preference on others. I've had to walk senior engineers through (or just manually clean up when they clearly have no idea how git works) branches that people royally mess up because they merged something in 8 different ways because some other person told them rewriting history is evil or some previous organization taught them to only push merge commits to PRs or protected all branches or something...

There can both be organizations that need to enforce policy to make their business successful and people that don't really understand the full gamut of what's possible with a tool and restrict workflows to stuff they understand. I don't think I equivocated the two. I simply expressed frustration from all the times I've anecdotally encountered people to aren't fluent with git making decisions for others who are fluent with git on how git should be applied.