Backports

We only offer support for the last two mayor version.

For instance, if we are on the version 0.28.0.dev, we make backports for v0.26.x and v0.27.x. We only backport fixes and not features, as we want to respect Semantic Versioning.

The idea of a backport is to bring a given fix from the last development version to an older release.

The process for making backports is the following:

  1. Check in the git commit history what was the latest backports on the branch that you are working with. Example for v0.27. Copy the number of the last PR backported.

  2. Search in GitHub for the this PR in the list of merged PRs of the type: fix. Example URL.

  3. Check the PRs merged just before and after this one. You need to find the last ones that were not backported already to start with the backport process. A fast way for checking this out is to open the PRs and see the mentions from the backports in the GitHub references.

  4. Once you have the list of the PRs that you want to backport, you can start with the process by using the backporter script. This script mostly handles the branch creation, cherrypicking, labeling and pushing of the fix. For using it you will need to have a GitHub Personal Access Token.

This is an example on how this command is called:

$ backporter --github-token=GITHUB_TOKEN --pull-request-id=10248 --version-number=0.27

And this is the current full documentation for this script:

$ ./bin/backporter --help
Usage:
  backporter --github-token=GITHUB_TOKEN --pull-request-id=PULL_REQUEST_ID --version-number=VERSION_NUMBER

Options:
  --github-token=GITHUB_TOKEN                                        # Required. Github Personal Access Token (PAT). It can be obtained from https://github.com/settings/tokens/new. You will need to create one with `public_repo` access.
  --version-number=VERSION_NUMBER                                    # Required. The version number that you want to do the backport to. It must have the format MAJOR.MINOR.
  --pull-request-id=PULL_REQUEST_ID                                  # Required. The ID of the pull request that you want to make the backport from. It should have the "type: fix" label.
  [--exit-with-unstaged-changes], [--no-exit-with-unstaged-changes]  # Optional. Whether the script should exit with an error if there are unstaged changes in the current project.
                                                                     # Default: true

Backport a pull request to another branch