alt Hacker NewsIt's totally possible that you aren't the target audience for this sort of feature. It tends to be more useful in very large team and/or monorepo contexts.
This isn't about siloing discussions: it's about focus. You can always see the full stack if you want to go look at the other parts, the key is that you don't have to.
The goal is to get thoroughly reviewed changes. It's much easier to review five 100 line changes than one 500 line one, and it's easier to review five 500 line changes than it is a 2500 line one. Keeping commits small and tightly reviewed leads to better outcomes in the end. Massive PRs lead to rubber stamps of +1.
I agree that that scenario sounds like a nightmare. But I don't think that a PR is the right place to solve that problem: it sounds like something that should have been sorted before any of the code was written in the first place.
> It's much easier to review five 100 line changes than one 500 line one, and it's easier to review five 500 line changes than it is a 2500 line one.
This is true if the changes are orthogonal and are truly independent. One should always favor small independent changes if one can.
But when changes are all actually part of the same unit, and aren’t separable (apart from maybe the first of N of them which may be mergeable independently), proponents always seem to advocate that stacked diffs can somehow change this fact. “Oh if only we had stacked diffs we could break this into smaller changes”, ignoring the fact that no, they’d still be ordered and dependent on one another.
Stacked diffs seem like a UI convenience for reviewers… that’s fine I guess. GitHub is basically what you get when you ask the question “how can we make code review as tedious and unhelpful as possible”, and literally anything would be better than what we have (seriously I could fill a book with how bad GitHub is. I don’t think I could design a worse experience if I tried.) So, maybe I should just be happy they’re trying anything.