Flare 2017 using Git with multiple authors

[lperkins]

Hello,

I’m part of a 3-person documentation team with 6 Flare projects (in Flare 2017). All of the projects are updated by all 3 of us. We had been working in SVN, so whenever one of us was working on a topic, we would lock it so that it could not be modified by the others, then unlock when it was finished.

Now we are switching to Tortoise Git, with which none of us has much experience. I’ve gotten separate repositories set up for each Flare project and used the Source Control Explorer in Flare to bind each project to its repository. Unfortunately, I have discovered that there is no way to lock a topic in Flare bound to Git, so we are investigating using branches to make our changes when we all need to work in the same project (which is most of the time).

My question is this: is there a way to merge branches using Flare?

Example: I create Branch 1 from master, make my changes, etc. How do I then move my changes from Branch 1 back to master? Can it be done in Flare, or do I need to use a separate application (such as the Git GUI or SourceTree)?

Related, if my coworker creates Branch 2 from master and makes changes in the same topic as I’m working on in Branch 1, can Flare merge both of those branches back to master with all of our changes intact?

Thank you!
Laura

[dcisneros]

Hi Laura,

That I'm aware of, you can't merge branches in Flare. We use GitHub to house our Flare project, and we're just now trying Git with Visual Studio Team System for another project. Both of those options let you merge branches via their UI by opening a pull request.

I hope that helps some!

[LeslieT]

I led a six-person team where we had our source in GitHub and used SourceTree as our Git client (recommend highly over Tortoise Git).

This system worked extremely well for merging changes. We did not use the Flare source control at all because it just isn't designed around the Git paradigm, which is very different from SVN and TFS. In Git you simply do not "lock" files. Branching is one way to isolate work in progress, but as each writer completes their task and merges to the origin, the others need to merge down those changes and address any conflicts locally before they push theirs.

Let me know if you need any details around how this works