Nixpkgs GNOME maintainers have the following workflow: When an alpha of a new GNOME release is published, they use update.nix script to automatically bump all GNOME packages in Nixpkgs on the gnome branch. After that, they walk through the commits, reading the release notes and modifying the package expressions as necessary. To have clean Git history where each commit points to a non-broken tree, maintainers push fixup/squash commits. Those are then periodically integrated by rebasing with auto-squashing.