I don't want to get stuck on the particulars of the specific jira, but take as an example HBASE-18842 "The hbase shell clone_snaphost command returns bad error message". This issue was fixed back in October, but only for 3.0.0-SNAPSHOT. It looks to me like a good candidate for earlier branches (and I've reopened it as I cherry pick it back): it's not marked incompatible, it is marked as a Bug, it has tests, it fixes some obviously incorrect behavior.
makes me think we'd benefit from a periodic report that committers could check for things likely needed for backport to earlier branches. even something simple like "bug, not incompatible, has tests, clean cherry-pick" would make it easier for e.g. me to find issues like this when I have a few spare moments. If nothing else, I'd probably use this locally when reviewing things that could make it to earlier release lines. The marginal work to e.g. output HTML and get it into Jenkins is pretty small, if some other folks think it might also be useful. I'd want to document it in the ref guide, since I think lack of that kind of pointer limits the utility of these kinds of things. Before I add this to the list of things I start implementing in the between-spaces of other things I'm working on, what do folks think?
