Versioning hardware vendor SDK with git

Question

We have n C projects which reference 4 different versions of a device SDK - 12.3, 13.1, 15.0, and 15.2. There is no public upstream repo for the SDK - it is released as a zip file. We need to patch the SDK to work for our particular needs, and would like to minimize copy-paste code sharing.

I would like to put the SDK versions in a git repo to share the current state of our patches between our n projects. My plan is to put all SDK versions as branches from a (mostly) empty master branch.

Is this a common best practice? If not, what is the common best practice for tracking local changes to unversioned 3rd party code, with dependencies on several releases?

Answer 1

Yes, it would be reasonable to store them as branches that way. It would even be worth tagging the original releases so they're super easy to get to. I would also suggest creating the branches as orphans or at least not having a dummy empty master branch.