When cloning Odoo and the third-party dependencies, you may want to ensure that you are using the exact same revision as the one you had in developments. There are several ways to do this:
- You can manually mark down the version SHA1 of the local revision in a file, record this in the project repository, and ensure that you are using the same revision on the production server
- You can use tags or branches on forks of these repositories in your GitHub account
- You can use git submodule to tie these revisions to the repository of your project (visit https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules for some documentation on this handy tool)
- You can use buildout to manage the various dependencies and freeze the revisions (refer to the Use buildout for repeatable builds recipe for more information on this)
Why not use the Linux distribution packages provided by Odoo?
You can do that and you will get started much faster because a lot of things are handled for you by the packages. However, there are a few issues with using the packaged source; most importantly, you cannot easily patch the source code of Odoo, which is easier if you run from the source. Granted, this is not something you have to do every day, but being able to use the standard development tools to achieve this, rather than manually applying and tracking patches on production servers, is a precious help and a gain of time. You may also be using the Odoo Community Association branch of Odoo (https://github.com/OCA/OCB), for which no packages are provided.
You can do that and you will get started much faster because a lot of things are handled for you by the packages. However, there are a few issues with using the packaged source; most importantly, you cannot easily patch the source code of Odoo, which is easier if you run from the source. Granted, this is not something you have to do every day, but being able to use the standard development tools to achieve this, rather than manually applying and tracking patches on production servers, is a precious help and a gain of time. You may also be using the Odoo Community Association branch of Odoo (https://github.com/OCA/OCB), for which no packages are provided.