Your GitHub pull request workflow is slowing everyone down

• spr

  10 647 7.2 Go

  Stacked Pull Requests on GitHub

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

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