Re: Marking changes to be backported

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>
> Date: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 02:37:30 -0400
> Cc: Emacs developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> Stefan Monnier wrote:
> 
> >> There needs to be an agreed convention to mark trunk changes that should
> >> be backported to the release branch at some later date. "Remember to do
> >> it" doesn't scale.
> >
> > If it's really needed, we can have a "emacs-24-next" branch for that.
> 
> I think it will be needed if: there are to be pure bug-fix releases, and
> pretesting is going to continue to take months, and development is going
> to continue at the same time. (There are probably tons of things fixed
> in trunk today that should go into version 24.5, if there is one. Who's
> going to dig them all out and backport them? No-one.)
> 
> > Then we merge emacs-24 into emacs-24-next, and then we merge
> > emacs-24-next into trunk.
> 
> Yet more branches sounds more complicated to me (doesn't that mean you
> need to know when you make a change where it should go?), but I don't
> care about the system so long as there is one.

I think using another (3rd) branch is on balance the most reliable and
least error prone method.  It is also much less effort to merge
between branches than to cherry-pick.