MadCap Software Forums

Hey all.

My company tried to upgrade to Flare 2021 r3 today, and we encountered a significant issue. I've been in touch with other Flare users who are having the same issue, and the commonality we found is in the way we are bound to GIT source control.

I can’t speak for MadCap, but from what I can gather, the issue appears to relate to how you have configured your GIT repo.

If you have configured your GIT repo on the folder where your .flprj file exists, you shouldn’t have any trouble with this issue. I can’t be sure, because this isn’t my primary setup.

If you have configured your GIT repo on a DIFFERENT folder than where your .flprj file lives, you WILL encounter this issue.

Here's why: When you open the Flare project, Flare traverses the parent folders looking for any existing GIT repo; if it finds it, then it seems like it automatically turns on binding to GIT, regardless of the settings you have in your .flprj file that say to ignore GIT bindings.

Then, Flare expects your project to be bound at the project level (where the .flprj file is). If it isn’t, Flare initializes a NEW git repo at that level. So you now have a repo inside a repo.

If you delete the git repo that Flare incorrectly created, it will come back when you re-open Flare.

We will need to wait for official word from MadCap on this, but if your GIT repo exists at a different level than your .flprj file, I can’t see any other option (for now) than uninstalling Flare 2021r3, and reinstalling Flare 2021r2. That is my personal recommendation. Again, I don’t pretend to speak for MadCap. I'm sure we'll see something from them when they have had a chance to address this issue.

Update: MadCap has temporarily pulled the 2021 R3 release from their download site. When the download is available again, this issue should be resolved. The point is, if you are seeing this, but you can now download Flare, then this but should be resolved.

Thanks Paul, I really appreciate that you posted this information.

I just downloaded and installed 2021 r3 today (Jan 20), and I'm still seeing (the same, I think) unwanted behavior related to GitHub.

After I built an existing project with the new version:
1) Flare automatically added a .gitignore file at the same level as the project. We already have a GitHub infrastructure in place with .gitignore files on a different level, so this definitely has the potential to complicate things.
2) When I looked at the Project Properties > Source Control tab, I saw that Flare had bound the project to Git source control when it wasn't before.

When I unbound the project from source control in the Project Properties dialog, the .gitignore file went away. But the next time I built the project, the same 2 things happened again.

So I don't think this is fixed. When I right-click the Flare download file and select Properties > Details, it's File Version 17.2.8047.30191.

Same thing happened to me, though when I unbound the project using the Source Control settings in the Project options, it completely removed all Git files from my local repo, essentially disconnecting it from my main repository. I had to delete my local repo and re-import it from the main. Whereupon Flare insisted that I must be using the Git integration and prompted me to commit the changed .gitignore file before I could pull from the repo.

I don't want to use Flare's Git integration at all. How do I disable it?

Folks, deleting the .git folder workaround works for version 17.2.8042, and if your Flare project is nested in a parent folder bound to git. However, if your current version ends with 8047 this is not necessary.

Please Note: Flare 2021 r3 is not creating new bindings but instead auto-detecting the binding of a project already bound outside of Flare. Therefore, please ignore the source control ribbon if you wish to use your preferred GUI(GitBash, Tortoise Git, etc.) when interacting with source control. Another option is to revert to Flare 2021 r2. We are aware of the behavior and working on making the necessary adjustments to remedy the behavior. I appreciate your patience in this manner.

Please reach out to Support if you have additional questions.