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{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"Freezing deps/v8 on the main branch during major V8 upgrades","articleBody":"While working on https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/65161 which will upgrade deps/v8 from 14.6 to 15.2 on the main branch I've noticed a pattern - there have been many commits being backported to deps/v8 the main branch while the upgrade is happening, but these backports are actually causing mostly trouble rather than helping anything because:\n\n1. The release branches have much older versions of V8, so these commits likely need to be adapted again to even older V8 releases if they want to go out ASAP, then the rewrite targeting the main branch is therefore not very useful\n2. Most of these commits are already in 15.2, so they'll be overwritten by the upgrade anyway. However because they land too early on main, whenever this happens it creates a conflict for the 15.2 upgrade and we had to spend some energy to figure out if it needs to be skipped or re-applied (usually it just needs to be skipped)\n\nBased on these observations I think in general, when there's a big V8 upgrade pending on the main branch (say we are jumping more than 2 major versions), it's usually counterproductive to try backporting anything to deps/v8 on the main branch until the upgrade lands. If the intention is for the backport to go out on a release, the contributor should be redirected to backport that V8 commit to release branches, not main.\n\nOpening this issue to see if others agree and we can settle down on a more formal policy on this to reduce future churn.\n\ncc @nodejs/tsc @nodejs/v8-update ","author":{"url":"https://github.com/joyeecheung","@type":"Person","name":"joyeecheung"},"datePublished":"2026-09-29T12:19:05Z","url":"https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/66393"}