How do we get remote stash state without rebasing?

[gaetan-sbt]

Scenario

1. I created a stack and pushed the stacked PR
2. While I was away, some colleagues added commits to the PRs and rebased (so there has been a force push)
3. I want to sync my local state exactly with what is on the remote to start from a state that minimizes remote changes.

In other words, I'd like my local stack and branches to match exactly what's on the remote, with the remote as the sole source of truth.

**Question: ** how do I do that?

What I tried

gh sync

I assumed that there would be a command line option in gh sync, but it forces a rebase onto main and a push (which I don't want).

Deleting my local stack and recreating

I've tried recreating stack locally with

gh stack unstack --local
git fetch origin --prune
gh stack checkout <pr_number>

But because the branch exists locally, I get only my local state and not the remote state.

Awkward last-resort solution

I guess that the only way to do it is to delete all the branches in the stack from my local repo, then do the steps above, but this feels very awkward.

Is there a better way than this?

[XNinety9]

There's no flag for that today: when gh stack checkout imports a stack, it only creates the branches that don't exist locally (ensureLocalBranchFromRemote returns early when the branch exists), and sync always rebases and pushes. So recreating the stack doesn't help, as you saw.

You don't need to unstack, though. The local stack only stores branch names, so you can keep it and point each branch at its remote version with plain git:

git fetch origin --prune
branches=$(gh stack view --json | jq -r '.branches[] | select(.isMerged | not) | .name')
git switch main          # git won't force-move the branch you're on
for b in $branches; do git branch -f "$b" "origin/$b"; done
gh stack top             # or git switch <branch>

This throws away any local commits on those branches that aren't on the remote, so it's exactly "remote is the source of truth". If your colleagues also added or removed PRs in the stack (not just commits), gh stack checkout <pr> afterwards will show the composition difference and offer to replace the local stack with the remote one.