Change Control and Backports to stable branches

Changes can be submitted to a stable and a released branch in 2 ways:

• Directly submitted to the branch as a pull request with the Backport label
• Pull requests to main with the special label backport-vx.xx-branch (can be used with any branch) will automatically be back-ported to the specified branch (via the label) and a corresponding PR will created against that branch.

The following are the candidates for back-porting to stable branches and specifically the LTS branch:

• Security Bug Fixes
• Functional Bug Fixes
• Usability Bug Fixes and improvements
• Documentation and Test Improvements

Important

All changes to stable releases SHALL have a reference to an issue or a published advisory documenting the issue the backport is fixing and the severity of the issue or advisory.

Everything has to go through the CCB. Security fixes and bugfixes are non-contentious (though they still need go be approved by the CCB). Anything else needs approval from the CCB upon request from a particular developer, and will require justification and discussion.

The CCB meets once a week and goes through all proposed PRs open against stable branches.

The Tuesday release meeting will serve as a CCB meeting. Anything that requires escalation goes to the TSC.

The status of changes and queue of all candidates and their status is managed inside a project. Changes are approved when they are in the Ready column.