Even if fixes always applied cleanly to back branches, git doesn't provide a way to represent a 'backpatch'. That is, once you've committed a patch to the the

Even if fixes always applied cleanly to back branches, git doesn't provide a way to represent a 'backpatch'. That is, once you've committed a patch to the the current mainline, there's no official way to indicate that a commit on an older branch is "the same". That's a shame, as there would a natural way to indicate this in git's 'graph', if only you were allowed to tell it about additional parents after a commit is made. But that's not an option as long as a commit's parents are part of its hashed data. (If you could add parents, you'd make a new commit by applying the patch to the branchpoint, merge that into the release branch, and also add it as a new parent to the original commit, turning the original commit into a merge.)