spr

I have been chasing the gerrit code review high since I left a company that used it almost 5 years ago. Stacked pull requests are usually what people point to to get this back, but this article points out that _just_ stacked pull requests don't handle it correctly. Specifically with github, you can't really see the differences in response to code review comments, you just get a new commit. Additionally, often github loses conversations on lines that have disappeared due to force pushes. That said, I have a couple scripts that make it easier to to work with stacks of PRs (the git-*stack scripts in[1]) and a program git-instafix[2] that makes amending old commits less painful. I recently found ejoffe/spr[3] which seems like a tool that is similar to my scripts but much more pleasant for working with stacked PRs. There's also spacedentist/sp

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 r

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 full access to your repositories, and to not disappear in a year or two. - 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... - It gets messy unless 100% of the team is using it because th

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.