I’ve been considering the management of our services code under Git. It seems that the support of the distributed development model fits perfectly with sharing and developing code, mostly Perl, among multiple sites (consultants and/or customers). It allows us to keep a primary repository under our own control, but it also allows an on-site consultant to clone a repository and either enhance or customize or both while on site. After the consultant leaves, the customer would be able to choose to receive updates from our on-line repository on GitHub, for example, or not. They could also contribute enhancements, or not, and we can decide if we want to accept any changes they pushed, or not, or futz around with them first.

A consultant could make both enhancements and customizations and as long as they are in separate commits, we can cherry-pick the enhancement commits into our master branch. Pretty cool stuff.

Some of our customers have strict controls over what executables they allow to be installed on their machines, and they may not allow the Git executable client. However, one can clone a repository onto a USB drive and make modifications to the work tree there. This would appear no different than editing files outside of version control. After the edits are done, the USB key can be returned to a machine with a Git client, the changes added and then committed to the repository on the USB key. Those changes in turn could then be pushed to the on-line repository. So, a sort of open source development could be done without violating the customer’s security policies.