alt Hacker News> 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.
In stacked diffs systems, the idea is that the base of the stack (once reviewed) can always be merged independently, so you're totally right that like, if you just purely think you can split things up when they shouldn't be split up, that would be bad.
This is the model that the kernel uses, as well as tons of other projects (any Gerrit user, for example), and so it has gotten real-world use and at scale. That said, everyone is also entitled to their preferences :)