In this article I’ll report an issue I ran into when using GIT to develope an application with Adobe Flash. It makes a nice follow up to a previously posted report about the problem of syncronizing the .gitignore file

The errors occurred the first time after several commits to my repository on GITHub.com. When I tried to compile the .fla file the application wouldn’t start and the screen remained blank. Saddly no error was mentioned by the Flash IDE. After some reviews of the code and the fla file I saw that the fla file couldn’t find the DocumentClass.as and therefore would create one on the fly when compiling. I’ve tried everything from moving files around to restarting the machine and finally I recreated a working copy of my project by copying an old .fla file to my directory. This error occurred repeatedly and I already got the routine to solve it but wasn’t really satusfied with this solution.

After some googling I found this report from the Agit8 blog. The same bug seems to be an issue when using svn as the subversioning tool. Geoffhom points out at comment #48 that using the git gc command to reduce the git history solved his problems. It seems that the .fla file searches the whole directory for classes and is  searching the .git directory as well. This seems to be the root of the evil and it’s an easy thing to avoid:

Place the .fla and all the needed sources and classes inside a folder and keep the .git folder outside of it. So my folder structur now looks like this:

1. folder with .git folder, .gitignore file, README, LICENSE and the “app” folder
2. in the “app” folder I keep my com/ch/org etc sources, my .fla file and the DocumentClass.as

I hope this saves anybody a few hours of headches and brings some light into the dark zone Flash bugs