NetworkManager/MAINTAINERS.md

Upstream backports

There are situations where it is necessary to backport a patch to an earlier version of NetworkManager.

In order to do the backport, use git cherry-pick -x. Please use the commit from the later branch. If the commit is not on that branch then it is also necessary to backport to that branch.

Example:

We want to backport commit 323e18276894591712a5e29f6e907562c79c5216 from main (1.33) branch to nm-1-30 branch. In order to do that, we must search if this bug has been backported to 1.32.

git log --all --grep "323e18276894591712a5e29f6e907562c79c5216"

In case the backport to 1.32 is missing it would not show anything so please do the backport to 1.32 first.

If the backport is done, the output should be similar to:

commit c94b1c43d4b5c5b88d67d7966d23a005028e78d8
Author: Thomas Haller <thaller@redhat.com>
Date:   Wed Sep 1 09:30:29 2021 +0200

    cloud-setup: return structure for get_config() result instead of generic hash table

    Returning a struct seems easier to understand, because then the result
    is typed.

    Also, we might return additional results, which are system wide and not
    per-interface.

    (cherry picked from commit 323e18276894591712a5e29f6e907562c79c5216)

In this case, the commit that should be backported is c94b1c43d4b5c5b88d67d7966d23a005028e78d8.

Resolving conflicts

To find conflicts when doing a backporting in NetworkManager is very common but we do not resolve the conflicts manually. Instead, we abort the current cherry-pick and search for the commit that introduced the changes that are causing the conflict and backport it too.

We only resolve the conflict manually if the extra commit introduces a lot of unnecessary changes or excesive code changes which is not common.

Backporting API

NetworkManager allow the users to build their application against latest stable release and then run it against a newer release without relinking. If we want to backport a new API from main (1.33) to nm-1-30, we need to do something similar to 57c1982867609bf759fce202a172ceeb51a21d5f in main and nm-1-32 branch.

Example:

An user wants to backport 05f2a0b0247ee4aa3da371658f310bc655cbf1af from main branch to nm-1-30 branch. In this case, the user will need to write ec8df200f682c6726c1da624b5ae3984c4991056 and af00e39dd24644b8c979258e5579b43b88364d2f.