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

This is a report about some inconveniences with GIT when syncronizing the .gitignore file. In this article I define the problems I had and outline the circumstances that lead to this situation.

I ran into the troubles with my co-worker Christian Siegrist when syncronizing our GIT repositories. Christian forked my repository on GITHub.com. Previously I excluded some files from the GIT index. My .gitignore file looked like this:

.DS_Store
*.fla
*.swf
*.tmproj
com/modestmaps/*
com/stamen/*
docs/*

I had to remove the modestmaps and stamen library because as soon as I committed those libraries an syntax error was traced in flash. For more details on this subject visit the getsatisfaction.com thread.

When we tried to merge our branches we recognized that the .gitignore file didn’t accomplish it’s task. Christians files that had to be excluded were suddenly on GITHub in his master repository. We ended up removing all those files manually over Terminal and the pushed the updated repository to GITHub. Now Christians origin was clean of disturbing files and he first added a new .gitignore file and then the missing files I had sendt him. After updating the online repository again our merging was succesful and finally our updates came together.

Has anyone experienced similar problems or knows what caused this problems? Any advice would be appreciated.