Re: Workflow for templates?

Naah, dont rebase the upstream ontop of downstream - this doenst make any sense (yeah, my devs sometimes doing exatly this wong ;-o).

Instead, as you just said, cherry-pick the good commits into your upstream branch and rebase your downstreams ontop of that. (doesnt make any difference if this is done by different people or in different administrative domains).

That's one of the things rebase is for: not having your history filled up with merges at all, but always have your local cutomizations added ontop of the current upstream.

By the way: I'm also using this hierachy for package maintenance to different target distros:

   upstream branch
         |
         |----> upstream release tag X.Y.Z
         |
        \ /
   bugfix branch (maint-X-Y-Z) => general (eg. distro-agnostig) fixes go here
         |
         |-----> maintenance release tag X.Y.Z.A
         |
        \ /
   dist branch (mydist-X-Y-Z) => distro-specific customizations (eg.
         |                       packaging control files, etc) go here
         |------> dist package release tags X.Y.Z.A-B

Usually I do quick hotfixes in the dist branch (and assigning new dist version number), then copy the dist branch into some topic-branch, rebase into latest bugfix branch, cherry-pick the interesting commit(s) into the bugfix branch. When I do a new bugfix release (from by bugfix branch), I rebase the dist branch ontop the latest bugfix release tag, fix dist-package version numbers and run the dist-specific build and testing pipeline.

Here's some example for it: https://github.com/vnc-biz/redmine-core

cu