Re: Suggestion for cherry-picking to stable branches

[Sam James]

Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> writes:

>> > easy to compare with the original commit and distinguish
>> > branch-only commits from backports.
>
> You can get limited insights by comparing the ChangeLogs of the
> master branch with a stable branch.
>
> But if what you want is a mechanically verifiable assertion of
> any kind, I can tell you that none exists. Backporting patches
> is, ultimately, manual developer work. (This is obvious by the
> fact that developers who have to maintain 6 or 7 backport branches
> spend a *lot* of time on that.) You may trust or may not trust
> this developer work, but there is no mechanical way to prove
> that you can trust it.

I wasn't asking from a perpective of auditing, more that it makes life
far easier if investigating a bug. It's metadata in addition to the
commit summary (matching based on a title isn't easy, it's way easier if
someone says "here's the commits it's based on"; one can give multiple
such lines).

If it's not easy for you to add that metadata with your workflow, that's
fine, of course.

thanks,
sam