[Development] Finishing the transition to the cherry-pick model

[Volker Hilsheimer]

Hi,


We are now ready to take the final steps towards this change, implementing what was discussed at Qt Contributors Summit [1] and here on the mailinglist [2].

[1] https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_Contributors_Summit_2019_-_Branch_Policy
[2] https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2019-November/037927.html


The development and testing of the cherry-pick bot over the last month in a selected number of repositories [3] has given us confidence that things are working well.

[3] https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2020-March/039165.html

Thank you Daniel and to everyone else contributing to this! We will now proceed as follows:


1) we will shut down the forward-merging bot next week

Following the final merge of Qt 5.15 into Qt 5.15.0 next week, eta Wednesday. We will perform at least two concluding, manually executed forward merges from Qt 5.15 into dev, around RC time (end of April) and once the .0 release is packaged. So no changes will be lost.


2) we will update the santiy bot to warn for non-cherry-pick changes targeting branches other than dev

You can still make such changes, but they require sanity-bot override. This will be turned on at the latest with the final forward merge, ie around the time of the .0 release.


3) we will turn on the cherry-picking bot for all repositories

Expect this to happen in early May, but probaly not at the same time for all repos. We will update the commit template to include a commented out “Pick-to” footer.


During this process and starting next week, we will update the relevant documentation pages, such as:

http://quips-qt-io.herokuapp.com/quip-0005.html
https://wiki.qt.io/Branches
https://wiki.qt.io/Branch_Guidelines
https://wiki.qt.io/Merge_Guidelines

If you are aware of other pages that need updating, please share the links.


TL;DR

What this means for most of you is: finish whatever pending changes you have against Qt 5.15, and target the dev branches with new changes.



Cheers,
Volker