Bug fixes and patching

When fixing a bug that affects more than a single branch the prefered process for fixing the bug is to perform the work against the oldest branch and then patch that bug back up to each release branch and finally in to master.

For example, if a bug is reported to impact R1, R2, and master. You would perform the work against a branch of R1. When your fix is ready you would use the pull request and review process. See: [reviewboard] Then you would forward port that fix to R2, and finally once your fix was merged in to R2, you would forward port the fix to current master.

How To Patch

Once your inital fix has been merged by the bot the process of patching can be done with a few git commands. In this example I will show patching the fix in to master.

You will want to locate the SHA for the merge commit that was generated by jujubot. This will be viewable on github or in your git log output. Copy the SHA since we will use it to cherry-pick the fix in to master.

git checkout master
git checkout -b <fixed-branch-name>
git cherry-pick -m 1 <merge-commit-sha>

You may have some minor merge conflicts with the cherry-pick that need to be fixed, this is rare when patching, but occasionally it does happen.

git push your-remote <fixed-branch-name>

Now your new branch is ready to follow the same pull request and review process as the original fix. Note, if there is no other changes to the patched branch other than what has been reviewed already, there is no need for another review request. If there are differences, be sure to link to the previous review.