Backporting a set of patches in a single commit

[Langer, Christoph]

Hi Skara Team,

after gathering the first significant experiences with the backport process using GitHub/Skara, I find that there is one use case which works considerably worse than before. It is when you want to backport a set of patches that must be pushed together. Imagine you have a patch, then a build fix and then maybe another test fix. So as to not break builds and tests, you will want to push them together in one go. You could now add those 3 commits into one PR. But when you integrate, the 3 commits get squashed which is contrary to the usual way of backporting which tries to preserve individual commits. Alternatively, you could file 3 separate PRs. This, however, often bears the problem that the PRs might be dependent on each other. So any individual backport PR could possibly only be opened and reviewed after its predecessor was integrated. Which will leave the repo in a bad state for a while.

So what can we do here? Shall we change the paradigm and allow more squashing? Or did you already think of a better workflow? I think there is a feature of Skara called dependent PRs. Could that be used here? Or could maybe the backport bot recognize individual commits to preserve?

Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts.

Best regards
Christoph