Documentation/guides/developer-guides/maintaining-stable-branch-pr-merge-process.md

description
How to deal with merging PR and maintain a stable branch

Maintaining Stable Branch

{% hint style="warning" %} This Process MUST be followed during any period that master branch is allowing breaking changes. {% endhint %}

In order to maintain a stable branch it is required to follow a process on every PR that gets merged to ensure they are back ported.

{% hint style="warning" %} For a PR to be back ported it MUST reach the following criteria

• Contain no breaking API changes, changing signatures, removing a method, etc Additional overloads, methods, classes and extension methods are allowable.
• Be suitable for the stable release, by default most changes and features should be considered. {% endhint %}

Provided the criteria are met:

1. Merge the PR to master generating a merge commit.
2. i.e. "Merge pull request #5797 from AvaloniaUI/double-tapped-event-args"

At this point the git tree should look similar to this.

Now we need to get the new PR merged into the stable branch.

{% hint style="warning" %} Pay careful attention here, we don't just merge into the stable branch! {% endhint %}

• Checkout the stable/0.10.x branch.
• Cherrypick the merge commit from master.

The git tree should look like this now.

Please also use the backport-candidate and backported 0.10.x labels on the PRs themselves.