Git Patch Stack

Over the years we have determined that there are some pretty serious issues/drawbacks with how people classicly think of pull requests and the concept of feature branches, which seemingly & incorrectly have been intangibly linked for some time. Specifically, we have identified that the use of the feature branch concept tends to:

• promote non-logical commits, prohibiting certain Git functionalities (bisect, etc.) from working & making valuable peer review impossible
• promote extremely large pull requests, making valuable peer reviews impossible & time consuming
• promote lack of care around structuring commits which often results in people leaving WIP commits in pull requests
• have extremely heavy overhead in managing feature branches that depend on other feature branches
• often make the Git tree (history) extremely difficult to read & reason about

Git Patch Stack is an open source extension to Git and methodology we built to addresses all of the above issues by removing the need for the concept of feature branches and introducing a concept and local development workflow we call, Git Patch Stack.

To understand why we developed this workflow and the journey we took to finally arrive at this workflow. Please see our post Journey to Small Pull Requests.

For more details on how to use Git Patch Stack you can checkout out our blog post How we should be using Git. This provides the background and conceptual thinking around Git Patch Stack while also providing an example.