Overview

Have a stack of 4 PRs in a stack, with the base points to main. Encountered multiple issues throughout the lifecycle of handling conflicts, rebasing, re-approving. This discussion highlights a part of the process where there were missing approval buttons for the reviewer. Then, when trying to resolve the issue, merging the stack got stuck.

Problem

1. Had conflicts, resolved them. used gh stack rebase
2. Then, I had "phantom merge conflicts" and performed the workaround noted in this issue.
3. Due to rebase + force pushes, prior approvals were revoked (this is expected)
4. Reviewer is unable to re-approve (the approval button is missing for the reviewer - unexpected)

Workaround

There wasn't one. Here's a run down of what happened:

Initial state

PR-4 -> unapproved & unapprovable
PR-3 -> unapproved & unapprovable
PR-2 -> unapproved & unapprovable
PR-1 -> approved

Attempt to unstack, approve, and restack

1. Unstack
2. Surprised that PR-2 and PR-3 are magically approved now?
3. Request reviewer to simply approve the top of the stack, PR-4
4. All 4 are approved, lets continue restacking
5. Got into a new state I haven't seen before (see screenshot below).
6. Good news though, I can somehow approve now (despite usually not being able to bypass):

Attempt to squash and merge all PRs in the stack

Observe a all PRs stuck in a merging state