Baselines can be added as direct members of a transfer set. This operation is unrelated to the Include Associated Baselines option.
The advantage of including associated baselines in a transfer set is that when a project or task is replicated to another database, its associated baselines accompany it to the destination database. This operation allows users to perform a Find Use and see in which baselines the project or task was included.
If you have an application that is built by assembling different components that are developed in multiple databases, including the associated baselines can cause problems for update. In a database, a baseline has a subset of projects relating to the components developed in that database. The baseline does not represent all the projects across all the databases. If that baseline is sent to another database, update can choose it as the latest baseline. However, the database does not have all the project members required to select a baseline project. Therefore, update might be unable to select a suitable candidate version of some projects.
If you are using the predefined Entire database transfer set, the, all baselines are replicated to each database and the Include Associated Baselines option setting does not matter.
For example, you are developing an application in a database using a release value that is specific to that application. You replicate all the projects for that application. In this example, selecting Include Associated Baselines might benefit developers. However, if you replicate only some of the projects to each database, then this option might be harmful. Use the default setting.