0.54.0 cherry-pick issue has been locked, preventing community from helping maintain

[eliperkins]

• I have reviewed the documentation
• I have searched existing issues
• [n/a] I am using the latest React Native version

My company uses React Native for our mobile app and has been working to give back to the React Native community by identifying fixes and adopting the latest version of React Native to help identify issues in the latest releases.

Last week, we identified a regression in the <Text> component, and found that an issue had already been filed for it: #18258. Not only that, but @shergin had also identified a fix, and committed it to master: a534672

It's my understanding that these issues should be used to track what cherry-picks should happen to fix bugs in each release. In fact, I've been instructed by maintainers to advocate for cherry-picks in the past before.

However, upon proposing that a commit be cherry-picked into the latest release this time, the issue was promptly closed. I was left feeling like my feedback was not wanted, even though I had spent the time to thoroughly investigate the issue, and bring a well-formulated issue to light. I understand that React Native receives a lot of poorly-formulated issues that do not provide enough information for the maintainers of this repo to act upon, yet I feel that my comment was warranted as it clearly identified a fix.

Is this not the appropriate process to sifting through the sea of GitHub issues and identifying fixes, to help better maintain this project? If not, what is the right way to help maintain React Native, as a well-intentioned user of the framework?

Thanks for listening.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Find a regression in a React Native release
2. Identify a fix has landed in the next release
3. Identify that the fix would be backwards compatible with current release that has the regression
4. Propose that the fix gets cherry-picked into the current release to fix the regression

Expected Behavior

The fix gets cherry-picked by a maintainer in the latest release to fix the regression.

Actual Behavior

Issue to keep track of cherry-pick proposals is marked as "off-topic" and is locked by a maintainer.
#18128 (comment)

[hramos]

The last comment in the thread contains the actual location where we track cherry-pick requests, hence why it was closed and locked.

[eliperkins]

@hramos so should we propose cherry-picks to that issue instead? That's still unclear to me...

[hramos]

Yes. @grabbou coordinates releases and was the original advocate for tracking cherry-pick requests in issues in this repo. He has now created a new repo, react-native-releases, specifically for this purpose. Going forward, use that repo for cherry-pick requests. There should be an issue for each upcoming release. This will help keep the core repo clear of non-bug report issues.

[grabbou]

@eliperkins we are still working on this and will put some wiki notes to the repository itself later today/tomorrow. The main reason for having a separate repo for cherry picks/issue reports is to avoid anyone from the release team omitting an important bug due to other, non-release related notifications. I, myself, get hundreds of them and it takes a while to get on top of them all.

[grabbou]

Meanwhile, please carry on the discussion here: react-native-community/releases#10