Github stack does not persist across worktrees
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 52/100
Research direction
Start with the gh stack init entry point and trace how local stack membership is stored when $GIT_DIR points into .git/worktrees/<name>/. Reproduce the behavior across a main worktree and a linked worktree, including worktree remove; done means stack membership remains available when the branch is opened from another worktree.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
When opening a branch in a worktree and running gh stack init, it does not keep track of the stack locally. gh-stack keeps stack membership in local state tied to the checkout where init ran. If I create a worktree & use gh-stack, the stack doesn't persist on my machine, even if I open the branch back in my main worktree. Inside a worktree, $GIT_DIR is .git/worktrees// — so worktree remove deletes the stack state with it
This is confusing & not obvious. Additionally, a modern LLM workflow may involve different sub-agents in different worktrees. This makes gh-stack worse than, say git-spice for this purpose, since I can't easily update my work if I checkout the branch on my main worktree.
The stack is stored remotely on Github, but THAT doesn't always work - seems like GitHub only records a stack for a chain of two or more PRs.
- 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
-
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 88/100
NVIDIA/gpu-operator#2955 ·
-
agentic-workflows
Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 68/100
-
Difficulty 1/5 Under an hour Newbie friendliness 90/100
kovidgoyal/kitty#10516 ·
-
bug
Difficulty 1/5 Under an hour Newbie friendliness 90/100
cisagov/vulnrichment#337 ·
-
Difficulty 1/5 Under an hour Newbie friendliness 72/100