We use Madcap Flare for our documentation, and the project is checked into git. (In case this matters, this is a locally-hosted git server, not GitHub.) The project uses a .gitignore file to avert commits of output files and assorted Flare byproducts that don't belong in source control.

We do not use Flare's source-control interface and the project is unbound from git. People use git clients (mostly TortoiseGit) to interact with git, not Flare.

Yet, Flare sometimes modifies .gitignore. Sometimes people catch this before committing, which is a little frustrating, but sometimes they don't and it gets to a pull request before a reviewer catches it and the person has to remove it. We know we can use a git hook to block those commits, but we'd like to fix the root problem if we can.

In our group we have both Flare 2019 and Flare 2020 in use, and currently only the people using Flare 2020 are having this problem, but we've had the problem in the past too, and an unanswered support thread from 2018 suggests the problem is older too. (I also found related discussion from 2016.) Our group isn't large enough to really establish a pattern here; Flare version might be a red herring.

Is there something we can do in Flare to get it to stop modifying .gitignore? It shouldn't be touching files that aren't part of the project, but it is. Sometimes. Unpredictably.

posted about 3 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

3y ago

Monica Cellio‭ staff

2484 reputation 51 267 358 104