Cherry-Picking PRs into Release Branches

This document describes how to cherry-pick a merged pull request into a release branch for patch releases.

Prerequisites

• gh CLI installed and authenticated
• Clean git working tree

Overview

When a bug fix or change needs to be included in an existing release (e.g. v0.1.1), the corresponding PR that was merged into main can be cherry-picked into the appropriate release branch (e.g. release-v0.1).

Using the cherry-pick script

A convenience script is provided at hack/cherry-pick.sh. It automates the entire process: creating a branch, cherry-picking the merge commit, pushing, and opening a PR against the release branch.

./hack/cherry-pick.sh <PR-number> <release-branch>

Example

Cherry-pick PR #123 into the release-v0.1 branch:

./hack/cherry-pick.sh 123 release-v0.1

This will:

1. Fetch the merge commit of PR #123 from GitHub
2. Create a new branch cherry-pick-123-into-release-v0.1 from origin/release-v0.1
3. Cherry-pick the merge commit
4. Push the branch and open a PR targeting release-v0.1

Handling conflicts

If the cherry-pick results in merge conflicts, the script will stop and print instructions. To resolve:

1. Fix the conflicting files

2. Stage the resolved files with git add

3. Continue the cherry-pick:

   git cherry-pick --continue

4. Push and create the PR manually:

   git push origin cherry-pick-<PR>-into-<release-branch>
   gh pr create --base <release-branch> --title "🍒 [<release-branch>] <title>" --body "Cherry-pick of #<PR> into <release-branch>."

Release notes

The release-drafter workflow automatically drafts release notes for release branches. Once the cherry-pick PR is merged into the release branch, it will be included in the next draft release for that branch.