<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>anarazel</author><text>I think there&amp;#x27;s two different discussions here. One about cherry-picking for back-branch releases, one about development for the new version.&lt;p&gt;Re back-branches:
It&amp;#x27;s not particularly practical to use merges from&amp;#x2F;to stable branches. It may sound nice at first, but there&amp;#x27;s enough fixes that don&amp;#x27;t apply to all versions (because a feature didn&amp;#x27;t exist yet, because refactorings made bugs &amp;quot;accidentally&amp;quot; disappear, ...) that merging either to or from back-branches leads to very very messy merges, where the merge commit has to back out changes and such.  I don&amp;#x27;t know of any larger project that successfully uses merges to merge to&amp;#x2F;from stable branches.   So yes, it&amp;#x27;s just cherry-picking.&lt;p&gt;Re development:
The case here is a lot less clear. The project used CVS for a long while, and during the migration it was decided to not make the migration harder by changing workflows even more significantly than just CVS-&amp;gt;git.  So the, enforced, policy became that no merge commits are to appear.  It hasn&amp;#x27;t become a significant problem since, so that policy hasn&amp;#x27;t evolved at this point.  Given the relatively small number of active committers in the project, and the fact that commits in the project are expected to &amp;quot;stand on their own&amp;quot; (i.e. are complete and working), rebasing changes before committing them isn&amp;#x27;t a problem.  Several contributors, including committers, do their development in separate repositories &amp;#x2F; branches, however.  But usually the history there is messy enough that they wouldn&amp;#x27;t be merged anyway.  I think merging is more of a benefit when you have a more hierarchically organized project like the kernel, with subsystem maintainers that aggregate a large volume of changes, which then get pushed to Linus, who then integrates all of those.&lt;p&gt;Hope that roughly answers your question? If not, feel free to ask more about specifics.&lt;p&gt;(For context: I&amp;#x27;m one of the committers in the project)</text><parent_chain><item><author>liquidise</author><text>Fascinating. Can someone detail the pros&amp;#x2F;cons of this? Are they copying&amp;#x2F;cherry-picking commits from a dev track?</text></item><item><author>gsylvie</author><text>I find their branching model interesting (no merges ever!):&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  $ git log --graph --oneline --decorate --date-order --all

  * 86d911ec0f (HEAD -&amp;gt; master, origin&amp;#x2F;master, origin&amp;#x2F;HEAD) Allow index...
  * 7c5d8c16e1 Add explicit ORDER BY to a few tests that exercise hash-...
  | * 1888fad440 (origin&amp;#x2F;REL9_4_STABLE) Fix roundoff problems in float8...
  | | * 7786b98482 (origin&amp;#x2F;REL9_5_STABLE) Fix roundoff problems in float8...
  | | | * 404756fe89 (origin&amp;#x2F;REL9_6_STABLE) Fix roundoff problems in float8...
  * | | | 8f93bd8512 Fix roundoff problems in float8_timestamptz() and make...
  * | | | a507b86900 Add WAL consistency checking facility.
  * | | | 115cb31597 Fix relcache leaks in get_object_address_publication_rel()
  * | | | e35bbea7dd doc: Some improvements in CREATE SUBSCRIPTION ref page
  * | | | c3c4f6e174 Revise the way the element allocator for a simplehash...
  * | | | 242066cc8e Speed up &amp;quot;brin&amp;quot; regression test a little bit.
  * | | | ac8eb972f2 Avoid redefining simplehash_allocate&amp;#x2F;simplehash_free.
  * | | | 565903af47 Allow the element allocator for a simplehash to be specified.
  * | | | 94708c0e8c Fix compiler warning.
  * | | | 293e24e507 Cache hash index&amp;#x27;s metapage in rel-&amp;gt;rd_amcache.
  | | | | * 903bfef382 (tag: REL9_2_20, origin&amp;#x2F;REL9_2_STABLE) Correct thinko...
  | | | | | * 4dd4e3fe10 (origin&amp;#x2F;REL9_3_STABLE) Correct thinko in last-minute...
  | * | | | | cd898769cb Correct thinko in last-minute release note item.
  | | * | | | 13b30ada99 Correct thinko in last-minute release note item.
  | | | * | | ae8a602c32 Correct thinko in last-minute release note item.
  * | | | | | 39c3ca5161 Correct thinko in last-minute release note item.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>PostgreSQL 9.6.2, 9.5.6, 9.4.11, 9.3.16 and 9.2.20 released</title><url>https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1733/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>vog</author><text>I think that&amp;#x27;s the only explaination.</text><parent_chain><item><author>liquidise</author><text>Fascinating. Can someone detail the pros&amp;#x2F;cons of this? Are they copying&amp;#x2F;cherry-picking commits from a dev track?</text></item><item><author>gsylvie</author><text>I find their branching model interesting (no merges ever!):&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  $ git log --graph --oneline --decorate --date-order --all

  * 86d911ec0f (HEAD -&amp;gt; master, origin&amp;#x2F;master, origin&amp;#x2F;HEAD) Allow index...
  * 7c5d8c16e1 Add explicit ORDER BY to a few tests that exercise hash-...
  | * 1888fad440 (origin&amp;#x2F;REL9_4_STABLE) Fix roundoff problems in float8...
  | | * 7786b98482 (origin&amp;#x2F;REL9_5_STABLE) Fix roundoff problems in float8...
  | | | * 404756fe89 (origin&amp;#x2F;REL9_6_STABLE) Fix roundoff problems in float8...
  * | | | 8f93bd8512 Fix roundoff problems in float8_timestamptz() and make...
  * | | | a507b86900 Add WAL consistency checking facility.
  * | | | 115cb31597 Fix relcache leaks in get_object_address_publication_rel()
  * | | | e35bbea7dd doc: Some improvements in CREATE SUBSCRIPTION ref page
  * | | | c3c4f6e174 Revise the way the element allocator for a simplehash...
  * | | | 242066cc8e Speed up &amp;quot;brin&amp;quot; regression test a little bit.
  * | | | ac8eb972f2 Avoid redefining simplehash_allocate&amp;#x2F;simplehash_free.
  * | | | 565903af47 Allow the element allocator for a simplehash to be specified.
  * | | | 94708c0e8c Fix compiler warning.
  * | | | 293e24e507 Cache hash index&amp;#x27;s metapage in rel-&amp;gt;rd_amcache.
  | | | | * 903bfef382 (tag: REL9_2_20, origin&amp;#x2F;REL9_2_STABLE) Correct thinko...
  | | | | | * 4dd4e3fe10 (origin&amp;#x2F;REL9_3_STABLE) Correct thinko in last-minute...
  | * | | | | cd898769cb Correct thinko in last-minute release note item.
  | | * | | | 13b30ada99 Correct thinko in last-minute release note item.
  | | | * | | ae8a602c32 Correct thinko in last-minute release note item.
  * | | | | | 39c3ca5161 Correct thinko in last-minute release note item.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>PostgreSQL 9.6.2, 9.5.6, 9.4.11, 9.3.16 and 9.2.20 released</title><url>https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1733/</url></story>