Comment by mytailorisrich

FWIW, stacking is "just a tool" that you can use to make whatever sort of workflow you want. I agree creating alt PRs isn't a high-value usage of the tools.

The //actually better// workflows stacking enables are the same sort of workflows that `git add -p`, `git commit --fixup` and `git rebase` enable, just at a higher level of abstraction (PRs vs commits).

You can "merge as a stack" as you imply, but you can also merge in sub-chunks, or make a base 2-3 PRs in a stack that 4 other stacks build on top of. It allows you to confidently author the N+1th piece of work that you'd normally "defer" doing until after everything up to N has been reviewed.

An example: I add a feature flag, implement a divergent behavior behind a feature flag gate, delete the feature flag and remove the old behavior. I can do this in one "stack", in which I deploy the first two today and the last one next week.

I don't have to "come back" to this part of the codebase a week from now to implement removing the flag, I can just merge the last PR that I wrote while I had full context on this corner.

In theory you can do all of this stuff with vanilla git and GitHub. In non-stacking orgs, I'd regularly be the only person doing this, because I was the only one comfortable enough with git (and stacking) for it to not be toooo big a burden to my workflow. Graphite (and other stacking tools) make this workflow more accessible and intuitive to people, which is a big net win for reviewers imo.

> From a continuous integration perspective my understanding is that stacked pulled requests do not make change more frequent if we define a "change" as being committed on the master branch

Empirically this is not true if you also control for review quality. If your code review is a rubber stamp then sure mega PRs win because you put up a PR and then merge. But why review then?

However, code review quality goes up when you break things down into smaller commits because the code reviewer can sanity check a refactor without going over each line (pattern matching) while spending more time on other PRs that do other things.

And if you are breaking things down, then stacked PRs are definitely faster at merged to master/unit of time. I introduced graphite to my team and whereas before we struggled to land a broken down PR of ~5 commits in one week, we’d regularly land ~10+ commit stacks every few days because most of the changes of a larger body of work got approved and merged (since often times the commit order isn’t even important, you can reorder the small commits), conditional approvals (ie cleanups needed) didn’t require further follow ups from the reviewer, and longer discussion PRs could stay open for longer without blocking progress and both developer and reviewer could focus their attention there.

Additionally, graphite is good about automatically merging a group of approved small individual commits from a larger set of changes automatically without you babysitting which is infinitely easier than managing this in GitHub and merging 1 commit, rebasing other PRs after a merge etc.