Repository navigation
Feature Request: Support DAG's #16
Description
Hi,
Suppose I'm working on big feature A. Along the way I make small improvements B, C, and D. I can structure a stack like:
A -> B -> C -> D-> main
But suppose B, C, D are all orthogonal to each other. The above structure imposes an order that isn't necessary and may not even make sense (the diff on github will compare C with D, but we'd like to compare C with main. If D is controversial, review may take a long time, but B and C might be able to be quickly reviewed and merged, minimizing the distance of A to main (which is the end goal).
What I would like is a DAG:
A
/ | \
B C D
\ | /
main
This would allow us to review and merge with maximal "concurrency".
I'd like gh-stack to keep track of this dependency graph and automatically do the required rebasing on changes.
Is this possible? None of the existing stacked git tools seem to support this so I'm wondering if there is some fatal flaw.
Activity
luqven commentedon Dec 29, 2025
GitHub’s single-parent PR model makes true DAG workflows awkward, regardless of tooling.
While Git itself supports DAGs, GitHub PRs require each change to have exactly one base, forcing DAG-shaped work into linear or tree-like structures.
This leads to several issues when trying to maintain the DAGs:
Tools like Graphite address this by collapsing DAGs into explicit stacks, treating one path as the trunk at a time. This sacrifices some expressiveness but significantly reduces ambiguity and operational complexity.
You could achieve the same with
gh-stack, but again you have to "collapse" the DAG and treat each path a trunk.luqven commentedon Dec 29, 2025
For now I'm going to go ahead and close this issue, but happy to re-open it if there's more interest in the discussion.