**Motivation**
We would like to move towards a world where there is a clear attempt to try and
start becoming more predictable with release cycles and what the usage of a
release is going to be . As part of this ,releases need regression fixes.
However, if the community is making releases, there is likely to be an
expectation from users that such releases have reasonable practices in terms of
backporting fixes to the release branches and other aspects of development.
Backporting patches to previous release branches always have a risk and thus in
addition to having a review we need someone to think whether the benefits
outweigh the risk of additional breakage that our testing would not cover.
**Current Development Processes and it's effects**
In the current processes, there isn't clear separation between bug fixes and
new features and many a time a pull request will merge both a bug fix and a
feature request together in the same pull request. This is our defacto working
practice. Further when the pull request is merged, the history within the pull
request is entirely lost from the tree as the pull request is squashed when it
is merged and further there is no requirement on the original developer to
retain the branch from which the pull request is created. This makes it
difficult to track what the change is a finite time after the change was merged
in.
**Next Steps**
In terms of next steps, I propose the following steps that we can take.
A1. Change our contribution documentation to cover that pull requests need to
be small, self-contained and not mix bug fixes and new features.
A1.1 Make this part of our Pull Request Template.
A2. Tag Bug fixes as [Bugfix] or [RegressionFix] in the Pull Request.
A2.1 Identify which Release it was a regression in when an issue is
found.
A2.2 Agree that the fix is small enough to be backported to the release
branch.
A2.3 If you are proposing this as a backport, propose this with a tag
using [Backport-fix-<branchtobackportto>
A2.4 The contributor backports and a reviewer after evaluating the risk
of the backport approves it explicitly.
A2.5 Document this in the Issue Template in github.
---
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Topic](https://discuss.tvm.ai/t/rfc-improve-pull-requests-with-respect-to-bug-fixes/6529/1)
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