Restacking branches
A key benefit of using Graphite as opposed to vanilla Git when working with stacks is dependency management for your branches, i.e. keeping track of the "parent" of a given branch. When a parent branch changes in some way or is deleted, vanilla Git, because it does not have this concept of branch dependencies, leaves the parent as is.
The Graphite CLI introduces "restacking", which is the process of ensuring that the history of a branch is updated when its parent changes. Consider where we left off on the previous page after running
gt repo sync. Although part_2 is now dependent on main, we haven't yet restacked it, and we can see that by viewing the Git history with gt log long:
log long outputWe see that
main has advanced to the squash-and-merge commit for part_1, but part_2, even though it is supposed to be based on main now, is actually still sitting on the old version of part_1. We can fix that with gt upstack restack. This command, for the current branch and all recursive descendants, ensures that they are based on the current version of their parents.
The results of restacking
After running our
restack command, we can see that Git and Graphite are in agreement about the history. Now, we might want to resubmit the restacked versions of these branches (gt stack submit), or maybe make some changes to them first to address review comments (see the following page).Restacking is running a
git rebase under the hood, and as with any rebase, you may run into conflicts, in this case between the branch you are restacking and the new version of the parent. Just like with git, you will be prompted to resolve conflicts before continuing, which you can do with gt continue, which is described in a little more detail in the next section.Just like
submit, there are upstack, stack, downstack, and branch restack commands. It is likely that most of the time, stack restack and upstack restack will be the main commands that you use — downstack restack and branch restack are included for completeness.Last modified 5mo ago