Github workflow for public/provide codebase

Question

I would like to develop and release and SDK in an open fashion, via GitHub.

That said, I would like to have a team of developers work on this, make commits, create issues and comments etc in a private fashion.

It would be nice if I could only push the desired code to the public. The public section would also allow public people to do similar to the private team.

My current thinking is that I should have two repositories, one public and one private. Once happy with the work in private I can merge the branch into the public one. I guess it would be good to maintain a release branch in private repo and only merge that onto the public repo.

Is there a way that I can prevent the commit history going public? I'm sure there is a Git flag for that.

Is this a suitable workflow? Thanks.

Answer 1

You could probably use squash for that.

Depending on how many changes happen and how often you want to do it, I think maybe a more reasonable approach would be to completely detach the two repositories and handle merging manually between the two when the time comes.