[Python-Dev] I am now lost - committed, pulled, merged, what is "collapse"?

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> I don't think that is the main source of complexity.
> 
> The more difficult and fragile part of the workflows are:
> * requiring commits to be cross-linked between branches
> * and wanting changesets to be collapsed or rebased
>   (two operations that destroy and rewrite history).

I think there would be no technical problems with
giving up the latter - it's just an expression of personal
taste that the devguide says what it says.

As for the former, I think it objectively improves the quality of the
maintenance releases to have "managed backports", i.e. tracking that
fixes are actually similar and correlated across branches.

If you find this too complex to manage, one option would be to opt
out of "backporting", i.e. apply changes only to the most recent
branches. In many cases, the harm done by not backporting a fix
is rather small - the bug may only affect only infrequent cases,
or many users may be using a different branch, anyway. Others could
then still backport the change if they consider it important (and
do a subsequent "null merge" to properly link the backport).

Regards,
Martin