Also see Branching.

Patching can be used to let others work on your repository, without write access.

In essence they will clone a read-only version of your repository.

The idea is that the develop/stable branch never is touched on the user's computer. these branches should always be up2date with the latest what is on the server, and never be edited by the user.

The user should create a seperate branch, let's say: feature/mycoolfeature. Make absolutely sure this branch is created on top of official repository commits.

Once in the branch, do the work and commit your changes step by step.

Once done, pull in latest changes, rebase the branch on top of the latest changes and generate a patch (Git Extensions, Commands, Format Patch).

The important part here is that the patch (/branch) is never based on custom commits from the user, but always on official revisions that exist in origin/develop.

Otherwise the patch can simply not be applied to the official repo.

Send the patch by mail or whatever is preferred, for testing/reference, and to be implemented by someone with write access.

Generally they'd be creating the same kind of feature branch, import your patch, verify it's working, and merge it to the develop branch.

Creating Patches

• Pull latest from Repository, if you made own customizations, please use rebase, not merge!
• Create feature branch:

git flow feature start somefeature

• Commit your work
• Confirm your work
• Create patch, and send it upstream.

Applying Patches

Note: --ignore-space-change required to apply patches in Windows when core.autocrlf == false

• Create feature branch:

git flow feature start somefeature

• Apply Patch (Git extensions, commands, apply patch) (git am -3 patchfile.patch --ignore-space-change)
• Test, confirm.
• Merge back:

git flow feature finish somefeature