[yocto] release branches and package upgrades

[Adrian Dudau]

Hello,

I would like to understand Yocto Project's policy on the
release/maintenance branches (dora,dylan etc). My understanding was that
these were considered stable branches and only bugfixes and general
fixes that would not affect functionality were merged onto them.

However, lately, we identified patches that upgrade package versions and
introduced some problems in our distro. We had a hard time identifying
the source of these problems, since we expected the maintenance branch
not to change in this way.

Here are a couple of these patches as example in poky/dora branch:
50574e41b882c3f2633f69486593eaea54d8e554
63335c87c1904287cdd5fd28d0ad6a73e985f2a4

My question is: are patches like these normal and should we expect to
get version upgrades for packages on the maintenance branches as well?

Best regards,
--Adrian