I have a project I would like to release in public.
It has a large history and many branches. I do not want to release that. There will be a dreaded, fat "initial commit" on the public repository.
I'm looking for a workflow that would allow me to:
- develop my software in-house,
- keep some parts of the software private, not to be released,
- keep the whole history on the private repo,
- release at will on a public repo (not necessarily with squashed, single commits per release, I'd probably keep the history "equal" from some point [1]),
- accept pull requests on the public repo and eventually include them in my private one.
This is of course not suited well for git. I wonder what are my option to keep it as error-free as possible and scriptable.
I think there might be an option to go with patches and manual application. The problem is the selection of patches - how to ensure I upstream only things I want to without manually picking the commits?
It also sounds like a trade-off between cumbersome small releases or occasional releases with an awful lot of work to pick the correct commits.
Are there any standardized approaches to my problem?
[1] "equal" in the sense of same commit messages and content.
