qa-cherry-picks

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 — current
• docs/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):

1. Copy the previous doc as a starting point.
2. 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.
3. For each "Dropped" item from the previous doc, keep it for historical reference.
4. 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.
5. 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.