Code review tools should really compare with reviewable.io, which supports proper review of every-commit in a PR, with force pushes, making sure all changes get read, and comment sign-off and disposition, making sure no comment remains unaddressed.
In contrast to Gerrit and Phabricator, it needs not "Change IDs" inserted in your commits (easier workflow just using git) and "just works" to review whole branches.
It seems to me that "1 PR = 1 commit = 1 review" and "stacked PRs" workflows are just workarounds for not properly having implemented that as Reviewable has. Am I not seeing something?
Reviewable's main drawback is being for Github only and not open source.
Help me understand why I care about reviewing the fifteen commits my junior developer did while figuring out how to make a SQL query, and not just the final line of code? Typically, all I really care about is what's actually going into production, not the journey they took to get there. So, what am I missing?
Then, when your senior developer is working on a new feature that requires some changes to adapt to a dependency upgrade, some refactoring, some forwards-and-backwards compatible database migrations, you'll appreciate a stack of discrete, clean, working, individually reviewable commits.
> Note: This is a community fork of adevinta/maiao. The original maintainers are no longer at Adevinta and the upstream repository is no longer actively maintained. This fork continues development under runetes/maiao.
Hi! One of maiao's maintainers here, and ex-Adevinta.
tl;dr: Adevinta got bought by a Private Equity consortium [1]. Since then, the fund did many changes, and layoffs. All of the original creators/maintainers don't work there anymore.
Runetes is just an umbrella org for some OSS we created there.
1. It's explained in the README [1]. Tl;dr: Maiao is a "remote, sparsely populated volcanic atoll in French Polynesia"
2. I don't think so. The main difference from maiao to other stacked diffs projects is that it _progressively enhances_ GitHub. At the end of the day you just get PRs with branch #3 -> branch #2 -> branch #1 -> main. So, a bit of automation and rebases to do this. Because teams rarely can choose their forge, the intent is to not force org-wide change — e.g., change the VCS to jj — nor introduce more API/UI surface. You can be the only one doing stacked diffs in your team. Nothing breaks.
jj can work with git as its storage, so all of its commits are git commits, so a jj-local and git-remote flow is fully supported. I use it, and as far as I know I'm the only one on my team doing so.
This sounds intriguing. Additionally, I wanted the community to evolve our approach to providing PR feedback. One of the unintended consequences was that it became a tool for people to exploit their workers.
Ton of questions asked that are answered on the posted page including the history of the fork and the meaning of the name. Guys your fellow users are not Gemini.
As someone who much prefers Gerrit's UI/UX over GitHub's UI, I was disappointed that this wasn't replicating the UI for GH reviews.
Edit: Just to be clear, this is not a blemish on this project. More a lament and a wish someone would create such a thing for those of us forced to leave Gerrit behind for... GitHub. =/
Hi! Maintainer here :) I think some projects already try that. The main goal of maiao is to progressively enhance GitHub with stacked PRs (1 commit = 1 PR) and create as little new API/UI surface as possible. That's why we don't have a `maiao new stack` command. Everything just runs atop normal git with a bit of `git rebase` and automation around GitHub's API. I hope it clarifies the intent.
IME juniors struggle with making single commits in the first place. What I usually see is a scatter brained approach with more "fix" commits than anything else. This doesn't help with that, does it?
It means you can comment on the problematic commits saying "please squash this". Then (if it works as well as Gerrit) you can compare the commit between the before and after squash state.
Basically it lets you treat the commits as part of the thing you are reviewing instead of just a minor detail that the UI doesn't care about very much.
On large teams I think the "cherry pick" workflow (Gerrit style) beats the "pull request" workflow (GitHub/gitlab style). On smaller teams it's the other way around. I think it's somewhere around 10-20 people actively committing that the cherry pick workflow comes out ahead.
This is exactly it. When I worked in a ~10 person team I just didn't get it, PRs worked quite well (with some basic discipline, they're not perfect). When I moved to a... much larger company... I don't know how PRs would work here, it would be way too unwieldy. The Gerrit style works fantastically here.
I haven’t used this project but I have used Gerrit. It has its drawbacks (like terrible UX) but its style of code reviews were the most sensible and commit of every PR might not be as bad as it sounds. GitHub’s PR reviews are atrocious and it’s unfortunate they have become the gold standard.
In Gerrit, you commit every review, and the author has to edit individual commits to address them (using git rebase). This may sound PITA but it makes the history absolutely clean, and makes it easier for both reviewers and authors to review and address suggestions.
On Github, on the other hand, reviewing a large PR is just insanely hard. Making sure comment was addressed properly is hard as well, they can get lost in a sea of suggestions. They also become separate commits instead of being part of the commit itself. The commit should always been treated as unit of work rather than the branch.
1 commit == 1 reviewable unit == 1 PR == 1 CL == 1 feature == 1 fix is a perfectly reasonable way of working.
I used to work at companies where no one squashed their commits and the entire git logs were filled with 80% non-sense like "temp" or "bad" or "working" with the other 20% being coherent changes. What's the point of doing this I ask?
I don’t quite get the situation. After merging a PR/MR (with the squash feature of Gitlab or GitHub) the equality you describe holds and there’s a nice sequential git log.
I quite like that I can tell my colleagues they can commit whenever they feel like it (and should probably commit more often than they feel like) because it becomes one clean commit in the end anyways.
In my experience the situation with GitHub is either that
- you apply the commits as-is on the target branch and end up with a ton of pointless "fix this" and "fix that" commits that were created during the review process,
- you squash everything and lose what might otherwise have been meaningful, useful commit boundaries for the purpose of bisecting, reverting or just investigating the history of changes or
- you rework your commits and force push changes to the branch you want to pull and create confusion as to what changed because that's not usually how review is conducted with GitHub.
I think the pull request is a bad abstraction. Not terrible, and certainly easy to grasp, but bad enough that everything you do with it is a compromise. At the very best, if you apply with the squash+rebase strategy and limit the scope of your PRs to what makes perfect sense as just one commit in the target branch, it's just a convoluted way of working with individual commits.
there is an inbetween .... i insist people interactively rebase those commits out. In some contexts it is actually important to have traceability of iterative proof of work towards the final result.
Well are we talking about commits pre- or post-merge? I don’t care how many commits you put into the PR / MR as long as they squash down to a single commit upon merge.
IMHO equating commits and PRs puts undue pressure on the scope and quality of a given commit, adding potential for unnecessary stress and eliminating the benefits of an additional buffer / layer for aggregation of changes. A PR representing a sizable feature or refactor might naturally contain a dozen commits, each dedicated to a logical
area or a requisite subset of the whole. Assuming on principle a goal of keeping main in a known-good state, such intermediate and incomplete changes (fine in an unstable feature branch) would wreak havoc.
It's equivalent to asking, "Why would you have more than one story in an epic (or task in a story)?".
> IMHO equating commits and PRs puts undue pressure on the scope and quality of a given commit, adding potential for unnecessary stress and eliminating the benefits of an additional buffer / layer for aggregation of changes
You can do as many commits as you want locally. Then go back and squash them before pushing. I think that addresses all your points, if I am not mistaken.
In Gerrit, I would say that the equivalent of the epic is the topic, stacks are the stories and commits are the tasks.
It certainly puts pressure on the scope and quality of commits, but I think that's only undue for a short-lived project where you don't foresee a long period of maintenance. Consistently high quality commits with a clear scope is a godsend when you are investigating the history of a project. Some small pressure now is IMO better than greater pressure later when you are debugging an issue at three in the morning and scrolling through either a bunch of "fix stuff" commits or 1000+ line PR squashes.
If your PR has more than one commit, each one should be deployable in isolation. Which means you can split your giant PR into smaller ones that can be reviewed independently.
I’ve worked under both systems, but isn’t the purity you’re describing a bit of a dodge in that you wind up force pushing amended commits when you find you forgot something?
People say they care about the "story" behind the PR. But no one cares about that story if it's about forgetting to fix a test and a typo in a comment.
The extra commits are just noise that make you think the original commit is a source of truth in a blame when it has been amended 3 times more in the same PR, but the link isn't apparent anymore.
Force pushing is bad to a published branch, not a feature branch (not that you really have force pushes in Gerrit anyway). There are versions of Gerrit tooling where you can have a branch as dirty as you want locally, but only the final aggregated change is visible for review of that's what you prefer too.
In short: maiao supported stacked PRs on GH, before it existed as a feature :) Now that it's exists (beta), it simply does "progressive enhancement" and adds the PRs to the native stack. But you could still perfectly function without it. That's how maiao works on Codeberg, and Bitbucket, for instance.
GiLab has an interesting approach where they auto-stack up until 20 Merge Requests, if they're chained.
In contrast to Gerrit and Phabricator, it needs not "Change IDs" inserted in your commits (easier workflow just using git) and "just works" to review whole branches.
It seems to me that "1 PR = 1 commit = 1 review" and "stacked PRs" workflows are just workarounds for not properly having implemented that as Reviewable has. Am I not seeing something?
Reviewable's main drawback is being for Github only and not open source.
Then, when your senior developer is working on a new feature that requires some changes to adapt to a dependency upgrade, some refactoring, some forwards-and-backwards compatible database migrations, you'll appreciate a stack of discrete, clean, working, individually reviewable commits.
tl;dr: Adevinta got bought by a Private Equity consortium [1]. Since then, the fund did many changes, and layoffs. All of the original creators/maintainers don't work there anymore.
Runetes is just an umbrella org for some OSS we created there.
1 - https://adevinta.com/press-releases/permira-and-blackstone-a...
a) Not create new API/commands on top of it. Everything works with the normal "git commit".
b) Progressively enhance the user experience. Each commit becomes a PR stacked atop each other. It auto-rebases if the base changes, and so on.
A couple questions:
1) what's the name about? 2) does this get wicked messy if I'm the only one on my team using Maiao?
2. I don't think so. The main difference from maiao to other stacked diffs projects is that it _progressively enhances_ GitHub. At the end of the day you just get PRs with branch #3 -> branch #2 -> branch #1 -> main. So, a bit of automation and rebases to do this. Because teams rarely can choose their forge, the intent is to not force org-wide change — e.g., change the VCS to jj — nor introduce more API/UI surface. You can be the only one doing stacked diffs in your team. Nothing breaks.
1 - https://github.com/runetes/maiao/#why-maiao
Edit: Just to be clear, this is not a blemish on this project. More a lament and a wish someone would create such a thing for those of us forced to leave Gerrit behind for... GitHub. =/
Basically it lets you treat the commits as part of the thing you are reviewing instead of just a minor detail that the UI doesn't care about very much.
The current UIs don't punish you for that as the reviewer mostly sees one final coherent change.
sounds like crazy town.
I just dont understand why someone would operate like this.
Lets assume you're squash merging your feature branchs to your local main, then you're raising the them as prs.
why would you do this?
In Gerrit, you commit every review, and the author has to edit individual commits to address them (using git rebase). This may sound PITA but it makes the history absolutely clean, and makes it easier for both reviewers and authors to review and address suggestions.
On Github, on the other hand, reviewing a large PR is just insanely hard. Making sure comment was addressed properly is hard as well, they can get lost in a sea of suggestions. They also become separate commits instead of being part of the commit itself. The commit should always been treated as unit of work rather than the branch.
I used to work at companies where no one squashed their commits and the entire git logs were filled with 80% non-sense like "temp" or "bad" or "working" with the other 20% being coherent changes. What's the point of doing this I ask?
I quite like that I can tell my colleagues they can commit whenever they feel like it (and should probably commit more often than they feel like) because it becomes one clean commit in the end anyways.
- you apply the commits as-is on the target branch and end up with a ton of pointless "fix this" and "fix that" commits that were created during the review process,
- you squash everything and lose what might otherwise have been meaningful, useful commit boundaries for the purpose of bisecting, reverting or just investigating the history of changes or
- you rework your commits and force push changes to the branch you want to pull and create confusion as to what changed because that's not usually how review is conducted with GitHub.
I think the pull request is a bad abstraction. Not terrible, and certainly easy to grasp, but bad enough that everything you do with it is a compromise. At the very best, if you apply with the squash+rebase strategy and limit the scope of your PRs to what makes perfect sense as just one commit in the target branch, it's just a convoluted way of working with individual commits.
It's equivalent to asking, "Why would you have more than one story in an epic (or task in a story)?".
You can do as many commits as you want locally. Then go back and squash them before pushing. I think that addresses all your points, if I am not mistaken.
It certainly puts pressure on the scope and quality of commits, but I think that's only undue for a short-lived project where you don't foresee a long period of maintenance. Consistently high quality commits with a clear scope is a godsend when you are investigating the history of a project. Some small pressure now is IMO better than greater pressure later when you are debugging an issue at three in the morning and scrolling through either a bunch of "fix stuff" commits or 1000+ line PR squashes.
The extra commits are just noise that make you think the original commit is a source of truth in a blame when it has been amended 3 times more in the same PR, but the link isn't apparent anymore.
Force pushing is bad to a published branch, not a feature branch (not that you really have force pushes in Gerrit anyway). There are versions of Gerrit tooling where you can have a branch as dirty as you want locally, but only the final aggregated change is visible for review of that's what you prefer too.
Integration into main ideally is squashed down to a single merge commit though.
It shouldn't matter how many commits a pr takes to from 0 to finished
Edit: apparently stacked PRs on GH are older than I thought; the readme references a 2024 blog post about it.
In short: maiao supported stacked PRs on GH, before it existed as a feature :) Now that it's exists (beta), it simply does "progressive enhancement" and adds the PRs to the native stack. But you could still perfectly function without it. That's how maiao works on Codeberg, and Bitbucket, for instance.
GiLab has an interesting approach where they auto-stack up until 20 Merge Requests, if they're chained.
As they say in mtg, reading the card explains the card
What's a Gerrit? (Looks it up)
Gerrit is based on Rietveld
What's a Rietveld? (Looks it up)
Rietvelt integrates with SVN
https://xkcd.com/178/