I have(ie, “own”) an open source project that I want to do some work on and extend and then sell it. The problem comes down to managing it all in source control though. My open source project has SVN. This repo is publicly accessible. What would be the best way to make a secondary (private) repository, but keep these two sets of source code fairly in-sync?
The only way I can figure so far is just using creating and applying patches between the two. But that seems tedious at best. I’m thinking that Git might be able to do this good, but I’m unexperienced in Git, so I’m not sure.
I would recommend using Git instead of SVN. With Git you can merge between separate repositories and branches easily. You can find a great guide here. For example, if you were to host your code on github.com you could create a private repository for your own code and a public one for the open source project. You could then merge between the two repositories locally without having to create patches and apply them to each branch. Git is fast, so creating and destroying branches is easy and has little overhead. It is created with this workflow in mind and there is a great community available to answer your questions should you get stuck.