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Reordering a stack can cause PRs to be incorrectly marked as merged

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#411 1 comment 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
48/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
github, go
Domain
cli

Research direction

Start with the implementation behind gh stack push, then trace how reordered stack ancestry and existing PR bases are handled. Reproduce the gh stack modify, gh stack push, and gh stack submit sequence from the report; done means push safely synchronizes the remote stack or clearly directs users to submit, without PRs being incorrectly marked as merged.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Problem

After reordering a published stack, I ran:

gh stack modify
gh stack push
gh stack submit

gh stack push updated the branch ancestry without updating the existing PR bases. Some PRs then targeted descendant branches that already contained their commits.

GitHub saw empty diffs and automatically marked those PRs as merged, although their commits were never merged into main. The PRs could not be reopened and had to be recreated with new branch names.

Version

gh stack version 0.0.8

Expected behavior

I expected gh stack push either

  • to update the remote stack to match the reordered local stack,
  • or to fail and tell me to use gh stack submit for this operation.
Dominant language
Go
Stars
1.5k
Forks
73
Avg merge
1d 8h
Merged PRs (30d)
7

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

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  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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