Hi!
In their defense, the way they view the review/merge
model is that
you target the lowest necessary supported branch for fixes and new
features land in master. Lower branches are routinely merged upwards.
My experience has been this usually happens in older projects where most
changes is either maintenance work or changes that need to be maintained
across multiple branches. PHP does bugfixes this way, fix is put in the
least supported branch and then branches are upmerged up to master. So
upper branch is assumed to contain all lower branches plus new features.
--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org