I would recommend git-machete for stacking operations, it accomplishes most of the goals of this repo. It also has an excellent IDE Plugin.

git-stax

Commands for helping with stacked branches.

Problem

Branching multiple times solves the problem of staying unblocked. However, tracking and maintaining stacked branches is a huge pain.

The new --update-refs is helpful, but doesn't fix all problems.

Goals

Automate the naming of branches.
Traverse between parent/child branches easily.
Do not taint local branch state with changes that are potentially unmerged in remotes. Local state should match remote state as best as possible.
Easily sync up and/or rebase after code is merged in remotes.

See comparison.

Branch Naming Convention

We can skip most of the headaches that come with DAG traversal by using a branch naming convention:

Have your base or "feature" branch, and then append a hypen for every child branch:

trunk # or master or main
new/feature
new/feature-anx
new/feature-anx-mie
new/feature-dfg

Commands

new

Branches off of the current branch, appending a random string.

[repo] git-stax new                                                        feature/beta
[repo] git-stax new                                                    feature/beta-08W
[repo]                                                             feature/beta-08W-9j0

TODO: maybe some options about what the appended string looks like

Switches to parent branch.

[repo] git-stax prev                                                   temp/one-08W-9jO
[repo]                                                                     temp/one-08W

Switches to child branch.

Since a branch can have multiple children, if there is more than one child, it will do an interactive prompt to select which child you want.

[repo] git-stax next                                                       temp/one-08W
[repo]                                                                 temp/one-08W-9jO

snip

For when MRs get merged.

Updates the parent branch with the remote
Checks if the current branch's HEAD is present the parent branch. If so, offer to delete the current branch.

complete

TODO

Same as new, then

Pushes to remote
Creates a GitLab MR
- Targets parent branch
- Sets the MR Title to the last commit, stripping out the type/scope from conventional commits
[1] Yes, we could switch to email patches, but let's be realistic.