[Development] which branch to use for a fix in 5.9 ?

[Edward Welbourne]

Martin Koller (11 July 2018 10:50) wrote (inter alia):
> So I assume I should use 5.9 and not 5.9.6, right ?

Yes, except that that's an LTS branch, so it only gets cherry-picks back
from other branches (unless you have a strong reason otherwise).  Which
means you actually need to send it to 5.11 (the current oldest branch
accepting new commits) and, once it's integrated, git cherry-pick -x
(the -x puts useful things into the commit message) *from the integrated
branch* (not from your local commit, that you pushed for review) your
change back to 5.9.  It's a bit fiddly, but it saves us the need to
merge up from LTS branches when the next most recent branch is far
enough away that conflicts are apt to be common.

> "... It is terminated by a release tag, after which the branch is
> merged and deleted."
[...]
> However there are multiple 5.x.y branches. Shouldn't they be no more ?

Apparently we've been neglecting to delete old branches.  Thanks for
pointing it out - I hope Ossi and/or the release team shall take note
and catch up with those deletions.

The way you can tell whether a branch is stale is to ask git tag what
tags it knows about; you'll see there is a v5.9.6 tag, therefore it's
too late to push something to branch 5.9.6.

	Eddy.