Comparing / merging Flare projects (using Source Control)?

[Laurah]

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone has experience with using Flare source control, and/or combining or merging different versions of a Flare project?

A year or so again we started off with one Flare project, but because of simultaneous and very different project timescales we had to create two separate copies of it - so one stream of the project contains issue fixes, content, condition tags etc for feature X, whereas the other stream contains the same kind of stuff for feature Y.

Now we're at a stage where we need to create a project which contains both features X and Y. In effect, in source control terms, we've "branched" and now need to "merge". As far as I can see, this merge can be done in a few ways:

1. The worst possible scenario is that I need to have the two versions of the Flare project open, and manually compare them file-by-file in Flare. Obviously, I'd like to avoid this as much as possible.

2. A slightly more automated, but still risky, option is to use a third-party comparison tool (such as BeyondCompare) which would highlight the differences in two files, allow us to pick the lines of code we want, and then create one version of the code with both feature changes in it. Then we could manually copy-paste this new code back into the Flare topic. The problem here is that we can't compare any of Flare's "system files", such as condition tag sets, TOCs etc. Also, the manual copy-paste from another application introduces the element of human error when going through hundreds of topics (eg if a tag isn't copied over in full).

3. The best option would be to be able to do this in Flare - but this is where I'm looking for help. I've got no idea how the source control function works, and whether it's worthwhile to spend a lot of time setting up the system initially. We are using MKS as our source control system, and currently we are just zipping up the Flare files and putting them in the source control as a .zip file. Before I talk to our developers about integrating Flare into our source control system, I wanted to ask for your views:

Does anyone have experience in viewing the differences between a single file, or all files in a project in Flare using the source control?
Has anybody merged or combined two Flare projects into one? How did you go about doing it?

Any info/insight will be much appreciated!

Thanks,
Laurah

[forfear]

we use TFS source control over here. We share the same server as our development team.

I've used branching in our team project only to
- capture a baseline of what we have released to the environment.
it looks like this in TFS

MainProject
- English
- Chinese
Releases
- 1.0
-- English
-- Chinese
- 1.1
-- English
-- Chinese
- 1.2
-- English
-- Chinese


i know we can use merging in TFS as well and i imagine it could work...but we don't because its too risky. even our developers rarely do merging of branches in our Configuration Management practice simply because of the fear of duplicates appearing...we do have asimilar practice ..our support and development teams use BeyondCompare to do code comparisons...although i think TFS has a TFS Powertool which improves code comparison.

[trent the thief]

I've used WinMerge with a fair degree of success. http://winmerge.org/

It's pretty decent software.

[kathryngz]

A quick way to compare (for one-offs) is to generate both versions of a topic using a Word target, and then do a compare in Word (I had to do this today, in fact).

This method would only be feasible for very small comparisons, though--just a couple of docs. It would be horribly tedious for anything bigger.

[emsachs]

it depends a little on your source. Sometimes with a diff, you get false hits on difference because the XML file has changed even though the actual output is the same. I'm not quite sure why this happens, but I think one case is if you display in different output types (online vs. print) and then save.

So for example, if you have a header and you were working on it in print view, where you have numbers, you might have a tag like this:

<h2 MadCap:autonum="1.1  ">

But if someone else opened that file and worked on it in online view, where there was no number, it might just say:

<h2>

This could be even if all you did was put something in and then delete it, so the output is exactly the same.

We unfortunately have a lot of legacy styles from frame that are prone to this kind of change, so we see a lot of it in our topics. Therefore, this makes me nervous, because you are touching way more stuff than you need to and running increased risk of a merge that doesn't parse correctly. If your source is cleaner, you might not have as much of this going on and it might be worth looking at. I would be interested if you do try, to hear what your results are.

I also have done PDF/Word output and do a compare on that. But I usually just do it for reviewers. It does depend on how much you have.