Question

Your team maintains a public open-source library in Azure Repos. External contributors must be able to propose changes without gaining write access to the main repository, while your internal maintainers need full control over what merges into the default branch. You also want CI validation to run automatically on every proposed change before a maintainer reviews it. Which approach best satisfies these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Have external contributors fork the repository, submit pull requests from their forks, and configure a branch policy on the default branch requiring a build validation and maintainer review.

Answer

Grant external contributors Contribute permission on the main repository and rely on branch policies to block direct pushes to the default branch.

Answer

Enable a required reviewers branch policy only, and manually copy external patches into a maintainer-created branch before merging.

Answer

Give external contributors the Force Push permission on feature branches and require them to squash-merge into the default branch themselves.