A conflict low in a stack blocks merging PRs above it, even when they merge cleanly
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100
Research direction
Start by tracing how gh-stack determines whether stacked pull requests can merge and how it handles branches intended for staging deployment. Define the desired behavior for a conflict-free pull request above a conflicting one, including how its merge readiness and deployment path should be represented. Done means higher pull requests can progress independently without incorrectly bypassing their dependencies.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
The problem
Say main ← PR1 ← PR2. PR1 has merge conflicts against main and can't be merged. PR2 against PR1 is completely fine — no conflicts at all.
Merging is all-or-nothing for the whole chain up to main: if any PR in the stack can't be merged, none of them are. So even though PR2's changes are ready and conflict-free relative to PR1, there's no way to merge it — it's stuck behind PR1's unrelated conflict with main.
Impact
A single conflict low in a stack blocks everything built on top of it, even work that's fully ready and has nothing to do with that conflict. Teams end up stuck waiting on someone to resolve the bottom PR's conflict before any of the PRs above it can move forward, with no way to make progress on the parts that are actually ready.
This also blocks deploying feature branches to a staging environment for testing — a common practice at many companies. In this scenario, the feature branch is PR1's branch (the one with the conflict against main): deploying it to staging means merging it, and that merge is exactly what's blocked, so the branch can't be deployed until the unrelated conflict is resolved.
- Dominant language
- Go
- Stars
- 1.5k
- Forks
- 73
- Avg merge
- 1d 8h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 7
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
More from github/gh-stack
-
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 85/100
-
Difficulty 1/5 Under an hour Newbie friendliness 92/100
-
feature request topic: cli - general
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 68/100
-
feature request topic: auto-merge
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 68/100
-
bug topic: docs
Difficulty 1/5 Under an hour Newbie friendliness 68/100
Similar issues
-
feature-request helm
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 68/100
gravitational/teleport#69785 ·
-
bug
Difficulty 1/5 Under an hour Newbie friendliness 92/100
-
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 84/100
-
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 88/100
crossplane/crossplane#7859 ·
-
Difficulty 1/5 Under an hour Newbie friendliness 90/100