2-Version software: Best VCS approach?

Question

I suppose I\'d better explain my situation:

I\'m in the process of developing some software, and I\'m at the stage where I\'d like to split my project into two branches

Answer 1

If the only issue is a packaging and release management issue, you could isolate those steps (rename the package, and test it in a target environment) from the historization cycle within one Git repo.

So you could go on, separate your development, one feature per branch, keeping the same package names for both (in order to easily merge fixes from one to another).
But then, to test and deploy one of those two versions, you could have a script in charge of renaming the packages, recompiling, packaging (jar) and deploying the result in the target test environment.