| name | qa-cherry-picks |
| description | QA cherry-pick tracking documents for polkadot-sdk fork upgrades. Use when auditing, verifying, or updating cherry-pick tables in docs/cherry-picks/, when upgrading to a new polkadot-sdk stable branch, or when checking if a cherry-pick was applied. |
QA Cherry-Picks
Moonbeam maintains forks of polkadot-sdk, frontier, evm, ethereum, and moonkit. Each fork has a moonbeam-polkadot-stable<YYMM> branch with cherry-picks on top of the upstream stable release. The cherry-pick tracking documents in docs/cherry-picks/ record every cherry-pick and its status.
Documents
docs/cherry-picks/polkadot-sdk-stable2512.md — currentdocs/cherry-picks/polkadot-sdk-stable2506.md — previous
Table Schema
Each repo section has a markdown table with these columns:
| Column | Description |
|---|
| Applied | Yes/No — was it applied on the previous stable branch? |
| Title | Human-readable description of the change |
| Commit | Link to the actual commit on the current moonbeam-polkadot-stable<YYMM> branch (empty if Dropped) |
| Cherry pick | Included (on current branch), Dropped (removed), squash (folded into another) |
| Status | Upstream status: Permanent, Temporary, PR Upstream Merged, Upstream PR not merged, Needs PR upstream, Closed |
| Upstream PR | Link to the upstream PR (if any) |
| Note | Context, Jira tickets, related PRs |
Verifying Cherry-Picks Against a Branch
For each repo (e.g., polkadot-sdk), find the moonbeam-only commits:
cd ../polkadot-sdk
git fetch upstream stable2512
MERGE_BASE=$(git merge-base origin/moonbeam-polkadot-stable2512 upstream/stable2512)
git log --format="%H %s" $MERGE_BASE..origin/moonbeam-polkadot-stable2512
Upstream remotes by repo:
| Repo | Origin (fork) | Upstream |
|---|
| polkadot-sdk | moonbeam-foundation/polkadot-sdk | paritytech/polkadot-sdk (branch: stable<YYMM>) |
| frontier | moonbeam-foundation/frontier | polkadot-evm/frontier (tag: frontier-stable<YYMM>) |
| evm | moonbeam-foundation/evm | rust-ethereum/evm (branch: master) |
| ethereum | moonbeam-foundation/ethereum | rust-ethereum/ethereum (branch: master) |
| moonkit | moonbeam-foundation/moonkit (origin) | Moonsong-Labs/moonkit (branch: main) |
Then for each "Included" row, confirm the commit exists on the branch. For each "Dropped" row, confirm it does not.
Creating a New Cherry-Pick Document
When upgrading to a new stable branch (e.g., stable2603):
- Copy the previous doc as a starting point.
- For each "Included" item, check if it's still needed:
- Search for the upstream PR — if merged into the new stable, mark as
Dropped.
- Otherwise, find the new commit hash on the new branch and update the Commit column.
- For each "Dropped" item from the previous doc, keep it for historical reference.
- Check for gaps — diff the previous doc's "Included" items against the new doc to catch anything forgotten:
- Items absorbed into upstream need no action.
- Items with
Temporary or Needs PR upstream status need careful review.
- Verify every row by running the merge-base method above on each repo.
Common Pitfalls
- Commit hashes change between branches — the same logical cherry-pick has different hashes on
stable2506 vs stable2512. Always look up the new hash by commit message or content.
- Merge commits — some cherry-picks land as merge PRs (e.g.,
Merge pull request #8). Check the diff, not just the subject line.
- Cross-repo entries — the original Notion export occasionally placed frontier cherry-picks in the polkadot-sdk table. Flag these.
- "Applied" vs "Cherry pick" —
Applied refers to the previous branch; Cherry pick refers to the current branch. An item can be Applied=Yes, Cherry pick=Dropped (was on old branch, removed from new one because upstream merged it).
- EVM fork divergence — upstream
rust-ethereum/evm did a v1.0 rewrite. Moonbeam is on the 0.43.x fork, so "PR Upstream Merged" doesn't mean the cherry-pick can be dropped.
