R – Flash Source Control – Best Practices

flashsvnversion control

I'm working on a Flash project right now and I am having to force a designer into using our Source Control repository (SVN) to help manage and track the project. It's been a bit of an uphill battle to fully get him to embrace the benefits of source control, but it's coming along.

I haven't had to use source control for a Flash project before other than on projects where I was the only person working on it. I'm starting to discover there are some addition workflow pieces you need to implement around it so you don't have a nightmare fighting binary files.

Since I'm mostly working on the code, I've place all the ActionScript files into external files so I can work on them while the designer works on the FLA file with all the graphics. This seems to be working out alright, but when I need to change instance names and the like, I have to make sure I communicate well so we don't run into any issues.

I was wondering how other people handle Flash in source control and how they manage the workflow so a developer and designer can be working on the project at the same time.

Thanks.

Best Answer

You pretty much have the solution there. Communication is a very important part of version control systems and with binary files you need to be a lot more mindful of it. Unfortunately a lot of people just assume the software is the end all solution and team communication goes out the window.

I have made the mistake of evangelizing SVN to a client with a very large Flash codebase. I don't know if they will ever let me into that building again. Where I failed was that I was unable to change the culture of the organization so that there was more communication between people working on a project and as a result there was more yelling about who conflicted the .fla's.

Maybe adopt a daily scrum meeting ( some call it stand up ). Every morning have a five minute meeting and mention what you will be working that day and which files you may touch. If there is any probability that there will be conflicts be sure to communicate throughout the day while you work. This way no one is in the dark as to why svn is saying there is a conflict on a fla file.

I hope this helps.

How do you create a new project/repository?

A git repository is simply a directory containing a special .git directory.

This is different from "centralised" version-control systems (like subversion), where a "repository" is hosted on a remote server, which you checkout into a "working copy" directory. With git, your working copy is the repository.

Simply run git init in the directory which contains the files you wish to track.

For example,

cd ~/code/project001/
git init

This creates a .git (hidden) folder in the current directory.

To make a new project, run git init with an additional argument (the name of the directory to be created):

git init project002

(This is equivalent to: mkdir project002 && cd project002 && git init)

To check if the current current path is within a git repository, simply run git status - if it's not a repository, it will report "fatal: Not a git repository"

You could also list the .git directory, and check it contains files/directories similar to the following:

$ ls .git
HEAD         config       hooks/       objects/
branches/    description  info/        refs/

If for whatever reason you wish to "de-git" a repository (you wish to stop using git to track that project). Simply remove the .git directory at the base level of the repository.

cd ~/code/project001/
rm -rf .git/

Caution: This will destroy all revision history, all your tags, everything git has done. It will not touch the "current" files (the files you can currently see), but previous changes, deleted files and so on will be unrecoverable!

Best Answer

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How do you create a new project/repository?

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