I would recommend git-machete for stacking operations, it accomplishes most of the goals of this repo. It also has an excellent IDE Plugin.

git-stax

Commands for helping with stacked branches.

Problem

Branching multiple times solves the problem of staying unblocked. However, tracking and maintaining stacked branches is a huge pain.

The new --update-refs is helpful, but doesn't fix all problems.

Goals

• Automate the naming of branches.
• Traverse between parent/child branches easily.
• Do not taint local branch state with changes that are potentially unmerged in remotes. Local state should match remote state as best as possible.
• Easily sync up and/or rebase after code is merged in remotes.

See comparison.

Branch Naming Convention

We can skip most of the headaches that come with DAG traversal by using a branch naming convention:

Have your base or "feature" branch, and then append a hypen for every child branch:

trunk # or master or main
new/feature
new/feature-anx
new/feature-anx-mie
new/feature-dfg

Commands

new

Branches off of the current branch, appending a random string.

[repo] git-stax new                                                        feature/beta
[repo] git-stax new                                                    feature/beta-08W
[repo]                                                             feature/beta-08W-9j0

TODO: maybe some options about what the appended string looks like

prev

Switches to parent branch.

[repo] git-stax prev                                                   temp/one-08W-9jO
[repo]                                                                     temp/one-08W

next

Switches to child branch.

Since a branch can have multiple children, if there is more than one child, it will do an interactive prompt to select which child you want.

[repo] git-stax next                                                       temp/one-08W
[repo]                                                                 temp/one-08W-9jO

snip

For when MRs get merged.

• Updates the parent branch with the remote
• Checks if the current branch's HEAD is present the parent branch. If so, offer to delete the current branch.

complete

TODO

Same as new, then

• Pushes to remote

• Creates a GitLab MR

  • Targets parent branch
  • Sets the MR Title to the last commit, stripping out the type/scope from conventional commits

• [1] Yes, we could switch to email patches, but let's be realistic.