acyl VS spr

We have a project that is very close to what you describe: https://github.com/dollarshaveclub/acyl. Our system is tied to GitHub PRs and depends upon our Docker image building service called Furan.

Graphite is neat. If you want something lighter-weight, spr[1] is also worth taking a look at as an entirely client-side "solution" to PR stacking.

Unfortunately, it is very hard to build good code review tooling on top of GitHub due to the severe impedance mismatch between the two models as well as GitHub API limitations and rate limits. That mismatch cannot be fully resolved (branches vs. patches) and results in constant friction, and you end up trusting a third party with full control over your repositories and approval workflows.

Graphite is the best attempt I've seen so far, but it still doesn't come anywhere close to Gerrit[2], which simply uses plain Git commits. Every commit becomes a review, and stacking is accomplished by simply pushing multiple commits. No custom tooling required - just `git push`.

It has very, very good code review UX and allows meaningful and in-depth back-and-forth during a code review, without losing context or having to re-review the entire diff. Once you're past the initial learning curve, it is blissful.

Gerrit is open source and it's what Google uses for many of their public projects such as Chromium and Android, and it is quite easy to self-host. It is entirely built on JGit and even stores code reviews as Git commits alongside the repositories.

If you want to give it a try - there's a well-maintained public instance, Gerrithub[3], operated by Gerritforge. Many open source projects use it.

[1]: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr

[2]: https://www.gerritcodereview.com/

[3]: https://gerrithub.io

The CLI doesn't help with stacked commits, though. There's tools like spr[1] but none of them are anywhere as pleasant to use as Gerrit (or Phabricator, I guess).

[1]: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr

Haven't tried this one but Reviewable and Graphite. They're all very nice and yours looks nice also. The problem with all these third party SaaS-es on top of GitHub:

- You have to trust a random (no offense meant!) SaaS company with wide-ranging access to your repository.

- GitHub API rate limits end up causing issues sooner or later. For instance, Reviewable would randomly break and ask you to add more admin users so it could load balance API requests across multiple accounts!

- Likewise, you are still forced into the PR model and things that are trivial in Gerrit, like stacked diffs, are still hard. spr helps[1], but at that point you are piling workarounds on top of workarounds, might as well use a tool that supports the workflow natively...

[1]: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr

But, probably better to use https://github.com/ejoffe/spr (which I found many months after writing the create-stack script). Though, in this particular PR's case, it would have been a lot of work to preserve the commit IDs in the commit messages thanks to its generated nature; if you have a stack produced by hand, it'd work a lot better because a human is editing the PR and its description.

Another tool to look out for: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr

I've heard good things from our customers about spr for GitHub (https://github.com/ejoffe/spr). It extends git with useful commands and hooks directly into GitHub PRs. We'll be adding some direct support for the tool in Reviewable shortly.