I am in the process of upgrading to Flare 8 from Flare 6 and I wanted to have a more manageable system going forward and single sourcing seems like a good thing for me. As a result I will be making some changes to my setup. I just want to make sure that what I am planning will work -
Background:
I use SVN. I work at a software company and all of our products are release driven - all my Flare projects are branched off for every release we have. I do not keep local copies of all the old releases on my PC. I only have one local copy of all my projects that serves as the trunk. I keep a folder called "Documentation Trunk" that serves this purpose and houses all my Flare projects. I simply commit this folder to trunk, and then branch off the folder using Tortoise SVN everytime we have a new release.
Sometimes, I need to go back and make changes to some documents from an old release. I will create a new local folder on PC (titled "Old Release 1" for example) and will use Flare's "Import from Source Control" feature and I will get just the projects that I need as subfolders of the afformentioned folder.
Going forward - I will be adding a new project called "Global" to my Documentation Trunk folder on my local PC. This project will be used for global project linking (GPL) and it will house my stylesheets, snippets, etc. This global project will serve as a parent for my other projects (which will be children). From what I understand, when you use GPL and check a child into SVN, Flare will automatically copy everything that is being linked from the parent along with that child - is this true?
My question is once I have this globally linked environment and I make a branch for a release - If I "Import from Source Control" a specific child project from the branch, will my parent-linked content show up? Perhaps I just need to also import the "global" project from the branch as well? Will Flare update the linking to the parent project when you check something into SVN respective of where the branch is - or will the links still be pointing to the global project in the "Documentation Trunk" folder on my local PC and I will get tons of errors?
It is also worth noting that I will be using the Auto-reimport before "Generate Output" feature by using cond'l tagging on the global project - stuff to be imported will be tagged "YesImport." I am not sure if this complexity will cause issues - maybe I should just use the manual importing before generating output? I am unsure where the child project I imported from SVN will be looking for its global links. This is a hard thing to prototype with time constraints, so I am hoping someone may have an idea of how this works and what the best practices would be.
Thanks and please feel free to suggest any changes or better ideas as to how I should be doing this.