Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Can't merge the stack: either stuck while merging via GitHub UI, or getting false-negative error via CLI

Open
#498 2 comments 7 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

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

Reproduce with gh stack merge 37498 --yes --squash using the stack and approval state described in the issue, then trace the merge command's protected-branch check. No files or tests are named; done means the CLI and GitHub UI no longer block this stack when the merge base has not changed, while still respecting genuine reapproval requirements.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

See the stack up to https://github.com/react/react/pull/37498. All PRs were approved.

When I've attempted to merge it via UI, the merging was just stuck and never finished.
When attempted to merge via CLI, always received this error:

gh stack merge 37498 --yes --squash

Merging #37503, #37500, #37498 into main via squash...
✗ merge failed: protected branch 'main' check failed:
  Waiting on 1 reapproval from someone other than the last pusher. Review from eps1lon is stale because it was submitted before the merge base changed.
Stack merges are atomic, so nothing was merged

This is incorrect, because merge based didn't change after the approval.

I was able to merge the bottom PR of the stack, but this extremely painful, because after that the base actually changes, and now I need to get re-approval from the reviewers. Please, could you finally fix the stacks?

Dominant language
Go
Stars
1.5k
Forks
73
Avg merge
1d 8h
Merged PRs (30d)
7

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  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.

More from github/gh-stack

All issues in github/gh-stack

Similar issues

More Go issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.