Committing to release branches

[rcomer]

I've noticed that some projects target all their contributor PRs at main and have a bot that then, if necessary, reproduces the change on a release branch. For example, for this recent PR in pytest

• doc: Fix 404 'identify flaky test' link (#10244) pytest-dev/pytest#10301

the reviewer merges the PR to main and adds the backport 7.1.x label. The GitHub Action then comes along, sees the label, and opens a new PR with the same change against the 7.1.x branch

• [7.1.x] doc: Fix 404 'identify flaky test' link (#10244) pytest-dev/pytest#10302

Matplotlib does something similar, but with some sort of external bot, and based on the milestone. e.g.

• Fix issue with empty line in ps backend matplotlib/matplotlib#23964
• Backport PR #23964 on branch v3.6.x (Fix issue with empty line in ps backend) matplotlib/matplotlib#23994

Advantages to this approach:

• No confusion over which branch a contributor should target.
• Possibly less hassle with mergeback PRs (I've not been involved in those, but they don't look much fun...)
• Since bugfixes are merged straight into main, any linked issues will automatically close.

[trexfeathers]

Interesting. Bits of this model might also help with @abooton's suggestion of duplicate PR's for feature branches too.

[rcomer]

Relevant parts of those projects’ dev guides:

• pytest
• matplotlib