graphite-cli VS git-stack

This is exactly the problem that graphite-cli solves (https://github.com/screenplaydev/graphite-cli)

It keeps track of branchs and their parents by storing a tiny bit of metadata in the native git refs. It uses that information to perform recursive rebases: https://github.com/screenplaydev/graphite-cli/blob/main/src/...

It ends up working seamlessly - you just modify some branch, and then run `gt stack fix` to recursively rebase everything. (and then `gt stack submit` to sync everything to github :)

docs here: https://docs.graphite.dev/guides/graphite-cli

You can read Graphite's full implementation of metadata handing here.

We (Screenplay, https://screenplay.dev) built an internal tool (Graphite) to enable stacked diffs on GitHub for an individual (i.e. you can adopt it without your team also having to adopt it). It's inspired by some of the internal tooling we had at bigger companies. Specifically, the tool has two parts:

  * The CLI - https://github.com/screenplaydev/graphite-cli: Allows you to create diffs, restack them, submit them to GitHub, etc. It runs locally and stores all the metadata in your .git folder.

I'm not seeing a git compatibility layer? So I think it's a neat project, but I probably won't try it because nearly all code is rooted squarely in git. Even if Pijul is perfect, you'd need to convince everyone else to use it.

Nevertheless, the increased interest in moving to patch based workflows from branch based ones is great. There's a lot of similar tools here (https://github.com/gitext-rs/git-stack/blob/main/docs/compar...) which I refer to infrequently.

Personally my favorite tool for living-with-the-reality-that-is-branches is git-machete (https://github.com/VirtusLab/git-machete).

This is huge. I've wasted so much time on this, I wrote my own tool. No idea how thoroughly they've implemented this though (what all corner cases does it update or not)

> 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 `, `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.

I've been using termtree in my applications but I'm needing something more like git log --graph for git stack but haven't found a general purpose one (there is an implementation inside of git branchless) and haven't had a chance to make one myself.

Got a comparison of tools in this space at https://github.com/gitext-rs/git-stack/blob/main/docs/comparison.md

I try to keep the number of branches down but git-stack provides something like git log --graph that collapses branches from other users and old branches, keeping the main view clean.

Checkout https://github.com/gitext-rs/git-stack/blob/main/docs/compar... (note, the tool hosting this page is not included but as the author).

As the author of git stack, with all relevant biases, I recommend

- git stack for automating what you are already doing

- git branchless for more power at the risk of incombatibilities because its only as good as the data fed to git hooks

- jj if your open to something very different