We have some people in our company that use tools like Graphite to implement this pattern on top of Github and I don't know if I'm a big fan.
Maybe just a matter of developer discipline, but in my experience people tend to create large stacks of 3+ PRs that then take a while to resolve. Yeah sure, without these tools the code would also exist somewhere, but at least you don't have your pull request list full with PRs that aren't yet ready because the upstream PRs haven't been approved yet. You anyways have to (or should) review things stricly serially, so the additional PRs existing are not super useful either. Maybe as context for the reviewer to see the future work.
Also for some reason these tools seem to encourage people to put unrelated changes in the stack that could be based directly on master. Probably because they are anyways working on their stack and integrating some unrelated fix they just did into the current stack is easier than rebasing/changing your current context. But that's just a minor pet peeve.
That said, I would still like a tool that lets me manage stacked branches just for myself. Not exposing them as Github PRs or so, but to organize my work into different branches. Executing a chain of rebases of branch N -> (N-1) can get quite annoying manually. Probably some arcane git magic to (interactively) rebase branch N->(N-1)->...1 in one command exists already.
> Probably some arcane git magic to (interactively) rebase branch
There is not really a command for that yet, short of adding a bunch of `exec` steps to your interactive rebase manually. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32217204 for an upcoming command.
You might enjoy using https://github.com/gitext-rs/git-stack, which specifically tries to let you manage stacked branches locally while not exposing tons of PRs to your coworkers.
git-branchless itself also lets you manage stacked branches in various ways. For example, you can do `git checkout <branch>`, `git commit --amend`, and then `git restack` to rebase all the descendant branches sensibly. You can use it on the local side of things only and then use Github PRs as normal.
Also a big fan of https://gitlab.com/wavexx/git-assembler (and previously topgit). Works with the basic idea that you can rebuild branches by combining, merging or rebasing automatically on top of others. I frequently use this to build a local branch which is an amalgamation of the main branch + required patches so that I can work (and later submit) on a clean branch without being blocked.
This git patch stack tool is really nice. You don’t really use branches at all with it. You just build up a stack of atomic commits. At any time, you can request review of a patch, and it will cherry-pick the commit onto a new branch off of master and create a PR for it.
Maybe just a matter of developer discipline, but in my experience people tend to create large stacks of 3+ PRs that then take a while to resolve. Yeah sure, without these tools the code would also exist somewhere, but at least you don't have your pull request list full with PRs that aren't yet ready because the upstream PRs haven't been approved yet. You anyways have to (or should) review things stricly serially, so the additional PRs existing are not super useful either. Maybe as context for the reviewer to see the future work.
Also for some reason these tools seem to encourage people to put unrelated changes in the stack that could be based directly on master. Probably because they are anyways working on their stack and integrating some unrelated fix they just did into the current stack is easier than rebasing/changing your current context. But that's just a minor pet peeve.
That said, I would still like a tool that lets me manage stacked branches just for myself. Not exposing them as Github PRs or so, but to organize my work into different branches. Executing a chain of rebases of branch N -> (N-1) can get quite annoying manually. Probably some arcane git magic to (interactively) rebase branch N->(N-1)->...1 in one command exists already.