Best practice to maintain source code under version control with multiple companies?

Question

I'm wondering if there is any best practice for maintaining your source code under version control among different companies. In Open Source there is a maintainer, who receives patches, decides on them and applies them. But what about closed sourced projects where different companies get different workloads and just commit them to the trunk and branches? Is this maintainer concept applicable to a project on which multiple companies work on?

Answer 1

My recommendation : subversion, with that configured you give away a url and then checkout, update, get things done and when you guess that the project is ready, snapshot and deliver.

Answer 2

You can choose from a wide range of version control systems. (Not only subversion) With the "versioning" concept you are safe that no one damages the project permanently. So there is no need for a manual approval process, especially when there are contracts for example between the participating companies.

I'd also set up a commit mailinglist so you have some kind of peer review of changes. So no changes can be done without anyone noticing them.

If applicable set up some kind of continous integration environment to keep the quality up.

I don't understand the question about the branches. The decision whether to use them or not is IMHO not depending on the fact that the commiters are employed in the same company or not.

Answer 3

Usually, each site works on its dedicated branch and can import the other remote site branch, to decide what to integrate in its own work.

But if a site need to work directly on the other site branch, one possible practice is the concept of branch membership which allows only one site at a time to work on a given branch.
(not sure it is possible with SVN though)

That allows for two remote site (with a large time shift) to work on the same task in a tightly integrated manner.

Answer 4

Its really up to you to decide which workflow works best for the companies involved. Subversion has the ability to add permissions to your trunk and branches allowing you to lock down certain parts of your repository to people who are "trusted" with merge access to trunk. You'll need good communication amongst the companies. Using the open source Trac provides a wiki, integrated RSS feeds of the commits to the project and code browser.