[Proposal] Add `--recursive` option for `--squashed` to support Feature Branch / Task Branch workflows

[shimx]

Hello @motemen, @onk, and the maintainers .

Thank you for building and maintaining this great tool — we use it extensively in our release workflow.

Problem

In teams that use a Feature Branch → Task Branch workflow with squash merging, the current --squashed option does not detect task branch PRs that were squash-merged into feature branches.

Workflow example

production ─────────────────────────────────────────── ← merge
                                                        │
staging ──────────┬──── (squash merge) ────────────────┘
                  │         ↑
feature/foo ──────┤    squash merge
                  │         ↑
                  ├── task/foo-1  (PR #10, squash-merged into feature/foo)
                  └── task/foo-2  (PR #11, squash-merged into feature/foo)

1. Task branches (task/foo-1, task/foo-2) are squash-merged into a feature branch (feature/foo).
2. The feature branch is then squash-merged into staging.
3. staging is merged into production for release.

When running git-pr-release --squashed, only the feature branch PR is listed. Task branch PRs ( #10 , #11 ) are missing from the release pull request.

Since release PRs automatically link to the listed PR numbers in their description, including task branch PRs would make it easy to trace which release PR each task branch was shipped in. Currently, only feature branch PRs have this traceability.

Technical background

--squashed uses git log --first-parent to collect commit SHAs between the production and staging branches. The --first-parent flag only walks commits made directly on the staging branch, so squash merge commits that originated from task branches (and now live inside feature branch history) are never examined.

Proposed Solution

Add a --recursive option that, when used together with --squashed, removes the --first-parent flag from the internal git log command. This allows git log to walk all commits in the diff range — including those brought in by merged feature branches — so that task branch squash merge SHAs are also searched against the GitHub API.

Configuration

Method	Value
CLI flag	--recursive
Environment variable	GIT_PR_RELEASE_RECURSIVE
Git config	pr-release.recursive

Behavior

• --recursive is only effective when --squashed is also enabled.
• If --recursive is specified without --squashed, a warning is emitted and the flag is ignored.
• No additional GitHub API calls are introduced. The only change is the scope of SHAs fed into the existing search query.

Usage

# Detect task branch PRs that were squash-merged into feature branches
git-pr-release --squashed --recursive