[Development] Merging patches to old/5.0 or old/5.1 branches

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

Hello

I would like if we could clarify the procedure for merging patches to the 
old/5.0 or old/5.1 branches.

I personally feel that serious bug-fixes should always go the branch of the 
next release and the branch of that last release. Even if we do not plan to 
make another 5.1.x release, having a tree where we can point customers to, or 
where Linux distribution can pick up a reasonable set of patches would have a 
great value.

The issue has recently become more relevant with the issues surrounding Mac OS 
10.9. 

The biggest problem I see with these branches is that they do not have any 
bots testing it, so we need to be extra careful with merging patches. I 
suggest a policy of only merging patches that are already fully integrated 
into the newer trees, and which fixes new platforms, or fixes bugs on 
platforms or feature combinations that should work but wasn't fully tested at 
release, and of course security fixes, but we will do new releases if those 
pop up. Additionally we should require at least two +2 reviews before merging.

Example of a patch a have made for old/5.1 to fix the browser demo showing the 
qt-project.org website on OS X 10.9: https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,69637

Other examples of patches I would love to backport would be stuff like: 
https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,70041
https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,67809
https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,65672
https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,62610

Any comments or suggestions?

Best regards
`Allan