git maintaining 2 versions of the same project, with different users on each

Question

I have a (private) project in github where a team of developers commits changes. A client has now asked to develop some heavy customizations on their own copy of the system. A new team will be working on this project, but I don't want this team to have access to the original repository. So I created a new repository on github, and initialized it with the code from the original project.

However, I still want the 2nd project to get the updates done on the original project. How can I setup the repositories to meet this need?

Alternatively, if I am to keep a single project, is there a way to have the new team only access a specific branch on it?

Answer 1

I have followed the recommendation on this site. I'm repeating the process here for anyone interested: Let's assume that the original project is checked out in projectA and the derived project in projectB:

The first time I did:

 cd path/to/projectB
 git remote add orig_project path/to/projectA 
 git fetch orig_project
 git merge orig_project/master -X theirs
 git push

Now every time I need to synchronize changes from projectA to projectB, I do:

git fetch orig_project
git merge orig_project/master
git push

orig_project can be anything. I used -X theirs the first time, because otherwise all fetched changes conflicted