Fel

Fel submits each commit in a branch as a separate PR against a remote repo. Fel is designed to be a companion to the conventional git tooling. Rather than needing to create and manage stacks as first class objects, Fel infers the shape of a stack. You can continue to manipulate your repo with git without needing to keep fel in sync as you make changes. Fel also does not try and handle merging stacks, meaning it can be used without any support needed from the repo the stack is submitted to.

Usage

Create a new branch to represent your stack. The name of the branch will be used as the name of the stack. Make commits to your branch, each commit will be translated into a single PR. Amend commits as needed with this in mind. Upload your branch to GitHub with fel submit. Fel will automatically push a branch for every commit in your stack and create PRs with properly configured base branches, so each commit appears as a single diff.

If you amend any of your commits, run fel submit again from the top of the stack. Fel will force push the branches corresponding to each PR and post a message in each thread with a diff between the newly submitted commit and the last commit.

Once your PRs are ready to merge, merge them as normal using the GitHub UI and rebase your stack on top of the newly merged commit. Fel does not have an opinion on how stacks are landed, only how they're created.

Git config

Fel uses git notes to track the metadata associated with each commit. In order for fel to track commits across rebases and amends, you must ensure that notes.rewriteRef includes refs/notes/fel. This config ensures that git will persist the fel metadata when modifying commits with attached notes.

[notes]
	rewriteRef = "refs/notes/fel"

Config

Fel reads from a config file in ~/.config/fel/config.toml

token = "<github pat>" # The token used to create and modify PRs
default_remote = "origin" # The remote to push branches too and make PRs against
default_upstream = "master" # The branch of the remote to make PRs against

TODO

• Properly check XDG_CONFIG_DIRS for config file
• Optionally make commit messages authoritative and overwrite pr body on every submit
• Status command to view PR status
• Include stack name and index in PR title

What happened to the old version

Fel was previously a python script. It was getting untenable to maintain, and I've since learned rust. So I rewrote it in rust The legacy python version is available here